Haiti I Am Sorry: Hurricane Tomas - Cholera - Earthquake
Artwork; Haitian-Artist/Activist: SMITH GEORGES
Song: Trinidadian singer: DAVID RUDDER
LYRICS
HAITI I AM SORRY
By David Rudder (Trinidadian)
Toussaint was a mighty man
And to make matters worse he was black
Black and back in the days when black men knew
Their place was in the back
But this rebel, he walked through Napoleon
Who thought it wasn't very nice
And so today my brothers in Haiti
They still pay the price...yeah, yeah...
Chorus:
Haiti, I'm sorry
We misunderstood you
One day we'll turn our heads
And look inside you
Haiti, I'm sorry. Haiti, I'm sorry
One day we'll turn our heads
Restore your glory.
Many hands reach out to St. George's
And are still reaching out
To those frightened,
Foolish men of Pretoria
We still scream and shout
We came together in song
To steady the Horn of Africa
But the papaloa come and the babyloa go
And still, we don't seem to care...No, no...
Chorus:
Haiti, I'm sorry
We misunderstood you
But one day we'll turn our heads
And look inside you
Haiti, I'm sorry. Haiti, I'm sorry
One day we'll turn our heads
Restore your glory.
When there is anguish in Port au Prince
It's still Africa crying
We are outing fires in far away places
When our neighbors are just burning.
They say the Middle Passage is gone
So how come overcrowded boats still haunt our lives
I refuse to believe that we good people
Will forever turn our hearts
And our eyes...away...
Chorus:
Haiti, I'm sorry
We misunderstood you
One day we'll turn our heads
And look inside you
Haiti, I'm sorry. Haiti, I'm sorry
One day we'll turn our heads
Restore your glory.
Haiti, I'm sorry, sorry...
-----//-----
De volta à luta, ainda que tarde Ayiti! Perdoe-nos!
Showing posts with label Ayiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ayiti. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
This is not a Post. It is a Gift! [ ♪ ♫ ♪ ]
------------------------------------------------
The "This is Haiti" public service announcements
can be heard at www.greenff.org/
------------------------------------------------
"Alan Lomax In Haiti" box set: thehaitibox.blogspot.com/
------------------------------------------------
At 21, Alan Lomax went to Haiti and recorded its citizens making music — songs about Voodoo, carnival politics, children's games and the first airplanes crisscrossing its Caribbean skies in the late 1930s.
He preserved the sounds on aluminum discs for the Library of Congress, but they were largely forgotten for seven decades as they sat in the library's archives.
Recently discovered, they were compiled into a box set released last fall. Haitian music scholars called it a "cultural archive" that documents the daily triumphs that get missed whenever a crisis in Haiti makes the news.
The catastrophic earthquake last month that killed more than 200,000 people was the latest crisis.
Now, the set's curator hopes "Alan Lomax in Haiti" will teach people that Haiti's culture remains intact, even when so many of its arts institutions have collapsed.
Music from the 10-disc box set, released by Harte Recordings, is featured in three radio public service announcements seeking aid for Haiti.
Lomax was a newlywed ethnomusicologist when he set out to record the music of Haiti in 1936 and 1937, just following a 15-year American military occupation of Haiti.
He lugged his equipment into the mountains beyond the capital, Port-au-Prince, in search of ordinary people instead of polished performers and ended up with 1,500 recordings.
Ultimately, digital copies will be returned to Haiti, as some of Lomax's recordings from other Caribbean countries have been returned to those islands.
He found a wide range of music, from Boy Scout troops, religious processions, dances and bands of sugar cane cutters who brought back rhythms from Cuba.
Many of the Haitian Creole lyrics convey the impact of poverty and life in close quarters.
There also are songs about Haiti's global isolation after its slave rebellion and French ballads.
"The French romances (ballads) are not about courtly affairs and knights, but about the first time someone saw an airplane," Averill said.
When the earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, the box set's collaborators looked for a way to use the music to help the relief effort.
It could show a different picture of Haiti than just a country of rubble; it also could immediately restore something that was lost, they thought.
"My feeling was, at a time like this, people don't just think of bread and water all the time," Lomax's daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, said. "They think of everything that is jeopardized in their lives — everything in their culture."
Actor Fisher Stevens and Kimberly Green, president of the Miami-based Green Family Foundation, produced the radio PSAs.
Like other urgent appeals for donations after the earthquake, they feature celebrities — Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller and Sting — seeking pledges to The Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health.
"This is Haiti," the celebrities say over three music clips selected from the box set.
They note the country's stature as the first black republic in the world after a slave rebellion succeeded in 1804, then its proximity to the United States.
Only in closing do they note Haiti's poverty and previous disasters.
The three songs selected for the PSAs share a sense of danger, Averill said.
In each, the singers call out to the gods for help, but they also prepare to take matters into their own hands if an adversary comes to close.
In a carnival song, a community girds itself against an unseen adversary.
A song from a Voodoo ceremony implores the gods to soothe some trauma and relieve the singers' agony.
Lastly, in a procession of sacred music, the band honors a particular supporter with a refrain that's still familiar, more than 70 years after it was recorded.
The refrain of one song indicates some beliefs have not changed much since Lomax's time. "After God, the priest," a rara band sings, honoring the entities they considered supportive. After the earthquake, some Haitians uttered a similar refrain, describing the entities most likely to help them: "After God, the United Nations."
Green said she hopes to broadcast Lomax's recordings on Haitian radio stations as they come back on the air, to inspire the preservation of culture even if museums and concert halls won't be rebuilt for years.
"I hope it can provide some solace to people, some strength," Lomax Wood said.
The "This is Haiti" public service announcements
can be heard at www.greenff.org/
------------------------------------------------
"Alan Lomax In Haiti" box set: thehaitibox.blogspot.com/
------------------------------------------------
1930s recordings preserve
Haiti's cultural wealth
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
(02-24) 04:00 PST MIAMI, (AP) --At 21, Alan Lomax went to Haiti and recorded its citizens making music — songs about Voodoo, carnival politics, children's games and the first airplanes crisscrossing its Caribbean skies in the late 1930s.
He preserved the sounds on aluminum discs for the Library of Congress, but they were largely forgotten for seven decades as they sat in the library's archives.
Recently discovered, they were compiled into a box set released last fall. Haitian music scholars called it a "cultural archive" that documents the daily triumphs that get missed whenever a crisis in Haiti makes the news.
The catastrophic earthquake last month that killed more than 200,000 people was the latest crisis.
Now, the set's curator hopes "Alan Lomax in Haiti" will teach people that Haiti's culture remains intact, even when so many of its arts institutions have collapsed.
Music from the 10-disc box set, released by Harte Recordings, is featured in three radio public service announcements seeking aid for Haiti.
"It's too easy for people to just periodically feel sorry for Haiti," Gage Averill said. "Very few people except those who travel to Haiti understand just how much Haiti has to offer, how lovely a country it is, how generous a country it is."
Lomax was a newlywed ethnomusicologist when he set out to record the music of Haiti in 1936 and 1937, just following a 15-year American military occupation of Haiti.
He lugged his equipment into the mountains beyond the capital, Port-au-Prince, in search of ordinary people instead of polished performers and ended up with 1,500 recordings.
Ultimately, digital copies will be returned to Haiti, as some of Lomax's recordings from other Caribbean countries have been returned to those islands.
He found a wide range of music, from Boy Scout troops, religious processions, dances and bands of sugar cane cutters who brought back rhythms from Cuba.
Many of the Haitian Creole lyrics convey the impact of poverty and life in close quarters.
There also are songs about Haiti's global isolation after its slave rebellion and French ballads.
"The French romances (ballads) are not about courtly affairs and knights, but about the first time someone saw an airplane," Averill said.
When the earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, the box set's collaborators looked for a way to use the music to help the relief effort.
It could show a different picture of Haiti than just a country of rubble; it also could immediately restore something that was lost, they thought.
"My feeling was, at a time like this, people don't just think of bread and water all the time," Lomax's daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, said. "They think of everything that is jeopardized in their lives — everything in their culture."
Actor Fisher Stevens and Kimberly Green, president of the Miami-based Green Family Foundation, produced the radio PSAs.
Like other urgent appeals for donations after the earthquake, they feature celebrities — Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller and Sting — seeking pledges to The Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health.
"This is Haiti," the celebrities say over three music clips selected from the box set.
They note the country's stature as the first black republic in the world after a slave rebellion succeeded in 1804, then its proximity to the United States.
Only in closing do they note Haiti's poverty and previous disasters.
The three songs selected for the PSAs share a sense of danger, Averill said.
In each, the singers call out to the gods for help, but they also prepare to take matters into their own hands if an adversary comes to close.
In a carnival song, a community girds itself against an unseen adversary.
A song from a Voodoo ceremony implores the gods to soothe some trauma and relieve the singers' agony.
Lastly, in a procession of sacred music, the band honors a particular supporter with a refrain that's still familiar, more than 70 years after it was recorded.
The refrain of one song indicates some beliefs have not changed much since Lomax's time. "After God, the priest," a rara band sings, honoring the entities they considered supportive. After the earthquake, some Haitians uttered a similar refrain, describing the entities most likely to help them: "After God, the United Nations."
Green said she hopes to broadcast Lomax's recordings on Haitian radio stations as they come back on the air, to inspire the preservation of culture even if museums and concert halls won't be rebuilt for years.
"I hope it can provide some solace to people, some strength," Lomax Wood said.
------------------------------------------------
Go to Original (SF Gate) >
------------------------------------------------
The "This is Haiti" public service announcements
can be heard at www.greenff.org/
------------------------------------------------
"Alan Lomax In Haiti" box set: thehaitibox.blogspot.com/
------------------------------------------------
Go to Original (SF Gate) >
------------------------------------------------
The "This is Haiti" public service announcements
can be heard at www.greenff.org/
------------------------------------------------
"Alan Lomax In Haiti" box set: thehaitibox.blogspot.com/
------------------------------------------------
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Haitians call for Aristide's return
Go to Original (Times - South Africa) >
Feb 21, 2010 11:00 AM | By AFP
Titid - known to the rest of the world as Jean-Bertrand Aristide - was forced out of Haiti six years ago, but the suffering wrought by last month's devastating earthquake has intensified calls for the return of the Catholic priest who became the country's first democratically elected president.
Such calls are due in part to frustration with President Rene Preval over his low-key response to the disaster, but also to an enduring allegiance among many of the poor to the hope Aristide once represented.
"He should have come back already," said Joseph Wilfred, a 48-year-old father of three now sleeping on the streets near the Saint Jean Bosco church, where Aristide gave fiery, politically tinged sermons. "If he were here for this catastrophe, he would have handled it better."
Aristide, once a passionate advocate for Haiti's downtrodden who many accused of having grown hugely corrupt by the time he was forced from power in 2004, now lives in exile in South Africa.
Aristide has made no secret of his want to return to his country.
Three days after the massive quake hit - killing 217,000 people and leaving more than a million homeless - he told reporters he was ready to help. It was not the first time he raised the possibility.
Protests have broken out in the capital since the 12 January earthquake over the lack of food and shelter, with a number of demonstrators urging the diminutive figure (his nickname means Little Aristide) to come to their rescue.
Graffiti throughout the capital - and even on a rock at a mass grave for quake victims outside Port-au-Prince - calls on Aristide to come back, while support runs deep in the slums surrounding his former church.
"If he were here, we wouldn't be in this terrible situation," said Wesline St. Hilaire, a 32-year-old mother of seven who lives in a tent in front of the nuns' convent at Saint Jean Bosco.
She spoke as she sat on the ground cutting chicken parts covered in flies and tossing them into a pot, a church mass being held under tents a short walk away.
There was misery all around her, with buildings up and down the street crumbled and people taking up residence on the filthy ground. A child urinated on the roadside.
"President Preval cannot visit poor neighborhoods without MINUSTAH and the police," said Peter Lealis John, a 56-year-old living in a tent near the church. MINUSTAH is the name of the UN mission in Haiti.
Aristide rose to prominence by railing against Haiti's dictators in sermons, including the infamous Duvaliers, who held power from 1957 until 1986.
In 1988, his church was attacked and burned as he held mass, killing several people. Aristide went into hiding.
Only the shell of the building remains now, and the earthquake appears to have caused further damage.
Aristide was elected in 1991, but was overthrown in a coup the same year.
He returned to office in 1994 with backing from the United States, but fell out of favour with Washington amid claims of vote-rigging in the 2000 elections and political violence.
An armed rebellion in 2004 led to his exit. He has maintained ever since that the United States and France forced him to leave.
Father Wim Boksebeld, a priest at Saint Jean Bosco, said though he admired Aristide's fight for the poor, he did not think he should return.
"The Americans don't want him to come back," he said.
He spoke of Aristide's sermons and how he had denounced what he called a "banana regime," but said that the ex-priest moved too fast for his country.
Peter DeShazo, director of the Americas program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Aristide generated great hope which he failed to deliver on.
"And in the end, by the time he left the country in 2004, the country was pretty much in shambles," he said.
"You can't put all the blame on him, but certainly he deserves his share."
Aristide's return could cause more instability at a time when coordination is needed in the urgent aid effort following the quake, he said. "Any divisive element would be unhelpful," said DeShazo.
Feb 21, 2010 11:00 AM | By AFP
The burnt-out church where he once preached to the poor in a Port-au-Prince slum is in ruins, but the graffiti on its stone walls is defiant: "Titid come back," it says, "quick, quick."
Such calls are due in part to frustration with President Rene Preval over his low-key response to the disaster, but also to an enduring allegiance among many of the poor to the hope Aristide once represented.
"He should have come back already," said Joseph Wilfred, a 48-year-old father of three now sleeping on the streets near the Saint Jean Bosco church, where Aristide gave fiery, politically tinged sermons. "If he were here for this catastrophe, he would have handled it better."
Aristide, once a passionate advocate for Haiti's downtrodden who many accused of having grown hugely corrupt by the time he was forced from power in 2004, now lives in exile in South Africa.
Aristide has made no secret of his want to return to his country.
Three days after the massive quake hit - killing 217,000 people and leaving more than a million homeless - he told reporters he was ready to help. It was not the first time he raised the possibility.
Protests have broken out in the capital since the 12 January earthquake over the lack of food and shelter, with a number of demonstrators urging the diminutive figure (his nickname means Little Aristide) to come to their rescue.
Graffiti throughout the capital - and even on a rock at a mass grave for quake victims outside Port-au-Prince - calls on Aristide to come back, while support runs deep in the slums surrounding his former church.
"If he were here, we wouldn't be in this terrible situation," said Wesline St. Hilaire, a 32-year-old mother of seven who lives in a tent in front of the nuns' convent at Saint Jean Bosco.
She spoke as she sat on the ground cutting chicken parts covered in flies and tossing them into a pot, a church mass being held under tents a short walk away.
There was misery all around her, with buildings up and down the street crumbled and people taking up residence on the filthy ground. A child urinated on the roadside.
"President Preval cannot visit poor neighborhoods without MINUSTAH and the police," said Peter Lealis John, a 56-year-old living in a tent near the church. MINUSTAH is the name of the UN mission in Haiti.
Aristide rose to prominence by railing against Haiti's dictators in sermons, including the infamous Duvaliers, who held power from 1957 until 1986.
In 1988, his church was attacked and burned as he held mass, killing several people. Aristide went into hiding.
Only the shell of the building remains now, and the earthquake appears to have caused further damage.
Aristide was elected in 1991, but was overthrown in a coup the same year.
He returned to office in 1994 with backing from the United States, but fell out of favour with Washington amid claims of vote-rigging in the 2000 elections and political violence.
An armed rebellion in 2004 led to his exit. He has maintained ever since that the United States and France forced him to leave.
Father Wim Boksebeld, a priest at Saint Jean Bosco, said though he admired Aristide's fight for the poor, he did not think he should return.
"The Americans don't want him to come back," he said.
He spoke of Aristide's sermons and how he had denounced what he called a "banana regime," but said that the ex-priest moved too fast for his country.
Peter DeShazo, director of the Americas program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Aristide generated great hope which he failed to deliver on.
"And in the end, by the time he left the country in 2004, the country was pretty much in shambles," he said.
"You can't put all the blame on him, but certainly he deserves his share."
Aristide's return could cause more instability at a time when coordination is needed in the urgent aid effort following the quake, he said. "Any divisive element would be unhelpful," said DeShazo.
Could a Start-Up Competition Help Haiti?
Go to Original (The New York Times) >
By LORA KOLODNY
Could a nation still lacking basic resources and infrastructure and still reeling from a devastating earthquake benefit from entrepreneurial education and cash grants for small businesses? Startup Weekend, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle, thinks so.
Since 2007, Startup Weekend has been orchestrating gatherings of entrepreneurs, application developers, marketers and designers who, over 54 hours in 3 days, pitch their business ideas, self-select, break into teams, and then work to build what they hope will become successful technology start-ups. Each Startup
Weekend culminates with a business competition, where participants and invited panelists vote for the best overall start-up to receive a prize. So far, according to Marc Nager and Clint Nelsen, the organization’s directors, Startup Weekend has held 83 events in 62 cities, and those events have begin 290 ventures.
Several companies hatched at these events are now operational, a few with full-time employees, including: Mugasha, an electronic dance music site based in Portland; Skribit, an Atlanta-based tool that helps bloggers gather story suggestions from their readers; Foodspotting, an online food guide based in San Francisco that emphasizes local dishes and user-contributed photographs; and SnapImpact, a Boulder, Colo.,-based site and iPhone app that matches volunteers to charities and projects.
But Startup Weekend has never held an event in a developing nation, let alone an area recovering from a natural disaster. Attempts to organize a Startup Weekend in Nigeria in 2008 failed because the group lacked a network in the country to help secure a venue, promote the event, and recruit participants.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen intend to hold Startup Weekend: Haiti in the fall, following the rainy season. To do so, they will have to raise sponsorship funds here and forge partnerships there with experts and organizations including schools and government offices. They face a steep challenge and need to learn a great deal about economic development, said Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend, “but sometimes big challenges are best met by people unfamiliar with the obstacles.”
So far, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen have obtained one corporate sponsor, Microsoft BizSpark, a division of the software giant that offers free software and support to start-ups. BizSpark donated a venue for a fundraiser at the SXSW conference in Austin next month. Mr. Nelsen hopes the event will lock in at least $8,000 in donations and maybe more.
Startup Weekend will also seek donations online, using the services of San Francisco-based Piryx, a fund-raising platform that has worked extensively with politicians and nonprofit groups. In fact, it was Tom Serres, chief executive of Piryx, who suggested holding a Startup Weekend in Haiti.
Acknowledging their own lack of experience, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen say they don’t know who will show up for the event in Haiti. They hope to recruit a mix of aid workers and residents with business ideas. “Whether people have ideas for farmers markets and Internet cafes, or high-tech, medical and logistics businesses, we want to help them get started and let them know we can continue to support them financially and with advice,” said Shaherose Charania, who is chief executive of Women 2.0 (another entrepreneurial support venture) and who has volunteered to serve as a coach.
Everyone is hopeful, but not everyone is convinced. “They might succeed if they do their research,” said Melissa Carrier, executive director at the center for social value creation with the University of Maryland. “But there is a strong risk that Haiti may not be ready to absorb this kind of economic development by the fall. Basic needs of the citizens may still be so under-met that there won’t be capacity to even think about business creation and jobs.”
Startup Weekend promises to spend 90 percent or more of the total budget raised for this initiative within Haiti’s borders and to post its budget on its Web site. “Beyond that, I don’t want to make other promises,”
Mr. Nager said. If the event inspires the creation of one company or one job even, he said, he would consider it a success.
See The Prize’s guide to coming business plan competitions. And here’s how to win a competition.
By LORA KOLODNY
Could a nation still lacking basic resources and infrastructure and still reeling from a devastating earthquake benefit from entrepreneurial education and cash grants for small businesses? Startup Weekend, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle, thinks so.
Since 2007, Startup Weekend has been orchestrating gatherings of entrepreneurs, application developers, marketers and designers who, over 54 hours in 3 days, pitch their business ideas, self-select, break into teams, and then work to build what they hope will become successful technology start-ups. Each Startup
Weekend culminates with a business competition, where participants and invited panelists vote for the best overall start-up to receive a prize. So far, according to Marc Nager and Clint Nelsen, the organization’s directors, Startup Weekend has held 83 events in 62 cities, and those events have begin 290 ventures.
Several companies hatched at these events are now operational, a few with full-time employees, including: Mugasha, an electronic dance music site based in Portland; Skribit, an Atlanta-based tool that helps bloggers gather story suggestions from their readers; Foodspotting, an online food guide based in San Francisco that emphasizes local dishes and user-contributed photographs; and SnapImpact, a Boulder, Colo.,-based site and iPhone app that matches volunteers to charities and projects.
But Startup Weekend has never held an event in a developing nation, let alone an area recovering from a natural disaster. Attempts to organize a Startup Weekend in Nigeria in 2008 failed because the group lacked a network in the country to help secure a venue, promote the event, and recruit participants.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen intend to hold Startup Weekend: Haiti in the fall, following the rainy season. To do so, they will have to raise sponsorship funds here and forge partnerships there with experts and organizations including schools and government offices. They face a steep challenge and need to learn a great deal about economic development, said Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend, “but sometimes big challenges are best met by people unfamiliar with the obstacles.”
So far, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen have obtained one corporate sponsor, Microsoft BizSpark, a division of the software giant that offers free software and support to start-ups. BizSpark donated a venue for a fundraiser at the SXSW conference in Austin next month. Mr. Nelsen hopes the event will lock in at least $8,000 in donations and maybe more.
Startup Weekend will also seek donations online, using the services of San Francisco-based Piryx, a fund-raising platform that has worked extensively with politicians and nonprofit groups. In fact, it was Tom Serres, chief executive of Piryx, who suggested holding a Startup Weekend in Haiti.
Acknowledging their own lack of experience, Mr. Nager and Mr. Nelsen say they don’t know who will show up for the event in Haiti. They hope to recruit a mix of aid workers and residents with business ideas. “Whether people have ideas for farmers markets and Internet cafes, or high-tech, medical and logistics businesses, we want to help them get started and let them know we can continue to support them financially and with advice,” said Shaherose Charania, who is chief executive of Women 2.0 (another entrepreneurial support venture) and who has volunteered to serve as a coach.
Everyone is hopeful, but not everyone is convinced. “They might succeed if they do their research,” said Melissa Carrier, executive director at the center for social value creation with the University of Maryland. “But there is a strong risk that Haiti may not be ready to absorb this kind of economic development by the fall. Basic needs of the citizens may still be so under-met that there won’t be capacity to even think about business creation and jobs.”
Startup Weekend promises to spend 90 percent or more of the total budget raised for this initiative within Haiti’s borders and to post its budget on its Web site. “Beyond that, I don’t want to make other promises,”
Mr. Nager said. If the event inspires the creation of one company or one job even, he said, he would consider it a success.
See The Prize’s guide to coming business plan competitions. And here’s how to win a competition.
Friday, February 19, 2010
The U.S. in Haiti: Neoliberalism at the Barrel of a Gun
Go to Original (The Indypendent) >
By Arun Gupta
From the February 19, 2010 issue | Posted in Arun Gupta
Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, violence was never an issue, according to nearly all independent observers in the field.
The military response appears to be more opportunistic. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive police forces “devastated,” popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in want to rebuild Haiti on a foundation of sweatshops, agro-exports and tourism. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed it will be done at gunpoint.
The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S. troops crowded out much of the aid being sent to the Port-au-Prince airport following the Jan. 12 earthquake. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights were turned away, while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. By the end of January, three quarters of Haitians still lacked clean water, the government had received only 2 percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. Nearly a month into the crisis, the Washington Post reported, “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”
At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground with 15,000 more troops off shore at one point and dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. Embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, The New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”
The real powers in Haiti now are the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen; U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke; Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts); and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it,” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”
While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives told Democracy Now! on January 20: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population … organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps.” In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization … was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. … They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the U.N.”
A NEW INVASION
But that’s what Haiti is getting, including 3,500 more soldiers and police for the 9,200-strong U.N. force already there. These U.N. forces have played a leading role in repressing Haiti’s poor, who twice propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency on a platform of social and economic justice. And the poor know that the detailed U.S. and U.N. plans in the works for “recovery” — sweatshops, land grabs and privatization — are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years. Neoliberal reconstruction, then, will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army (or similar entity) as a force “to fight the people.”
This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly the slaughter of thousands by U.S.-armed death squads after each coup, the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas. Twice last year, after legislative elections that banned Fanmi Lavalas were scheduled, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate was reported to be at least 89 percent.
A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — also fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti will not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to do under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.
SWEATSHOP SOLUTION
In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul Collier.
Collier is blunt, writing, “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” He calls for agricultural exports such as mangoes that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export-processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier says, Haiti and donors need to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land;” outsourced customs; “roads, water and sewage;” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.
Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH ) with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.” In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas. Collier also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for post-earthquake relief.
Speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted dogooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. Some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference, drawn by “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh,” The New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. (The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite, and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. This episode sparked student protests starting in June of last year, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH .)
ROOTS OF REPRESSION
In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” This brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.
Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.
It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to grow and to terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.”
After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”
During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A Democracy Now! report from April 7, 2004, claimed that the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”
A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off funding for “road construction, AIDS programs, water works and health care.” Likely factors in the 2004 coup included Aristide’s public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, and his working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.
When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a U.N. war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. (Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.)
‘MORE FREE TRADE’
Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” which “calls for more free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.”
Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco. This plan is now being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs” in 2009, a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise.”
Haiti, of course, has been here before, when the USAID spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean- Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted onethird of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball, and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. (Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour.) At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used.
U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnutrition. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig (because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever), led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, and along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.
The latest scheme, on hold for now, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund (yes, that Soros). The planned location is Cité Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government- controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”
It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed violently.
For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated, and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best: “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”
By Arun Gupta
From the February 19, 2010 issue | Posted in Arun Gupta
Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, violence was never an issue, according to nearly all independent observers in the field.
The military response appears to be more opportunistic. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive police forces “devastated,” popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in want to rebuild Haiti on a foundation of sweatshops, agro-exports and tourism. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed it will be done at gunpoint.
The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S. troops crowded out much of the aid being sent to the Port-au-Prince airport following the Jan. 12 earthquake. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights were turned away, while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. By the end of January, three quarters of Haitians still lacked clean water, the government had received only 2 percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. Nearly a month into the crisis, the Washington Post reported, “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”
At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground with 15,000 more troops off shore at one point and dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. Embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, The New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”
The real powers in Haiti now are the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen; U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke; Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts); and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it,” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”
While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives told Democracy Now! on January 20: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population … organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps.” In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization … was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. … They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the U.N.”
A NEW INVASION
But that’s what Haiti is getting, including 3,500 more soldiers and police for the 9,200-strong U.N. force already there. These U.N. forces have played a leading role in repressing Haiti’s poor, who twice propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency on a platform of social and economic justice. And the poor know that the detailed U.S. and U.N. plans in the works for “recovery” — sweatshops, land grabs and privatization — are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years. Neoliberal reconstruction, then, will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army (or similar entity) as a force “to fight the people.”
This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly the slaughter of thousands by U.S.-armed death squads after each coup, the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas. Twice last year, after legislative elections that banned Fanmi Lavalas were scheduled, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate was reported to be at least 89 percent.
A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — also fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti will not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to do under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.
SWEATSHOP SOLUTION
In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul Collier.
Collier is blunt, writing, “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” He calls for agricultural exports such as mangoes that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export-processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier says, Haiti and donors need to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land;” outsourced customs; “roads, water and sewage;” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.
Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH ) with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.” In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas. Collier also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for post-earthquake relief.
Speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted dogooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. Some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference, drawn by “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh,” The New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. (The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite, and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. This episode sparked student protests starting in June of last year, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH .)
ROOTS OF REPRESSION
In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” This brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.
Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.
It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to grow and to terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.”
After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”
During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A Democracy Now! report from April 7, 2004, claimed that the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”
A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off funding for “road construction, AIDS programs, water works and health care.” Likely factors in the 2004 coup included Aristide’s public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, and his working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.
When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a U.N. war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. (Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.)
‘MORE FREE TRADE’
Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” which “calls for more free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.”
Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco. This plan is now being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs” in 2009, a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise.”
Haiti, of course, has been here before, when the USAID spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean- Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted onethird of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball, and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. (Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour.) At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used.
U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnutrition. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig (because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever), led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, and along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.
The latest scheme, on hold for now, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund (yes, that Soros). The planned location is Cité Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government- controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”
It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed violently.
For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated, and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best: “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”
Haiti Earthquake: Bill Clinton Launches the UN's Largest-Ever Natural Disaster Appeal
Go to Original (UN Dispatch) >
Mark Leon Goldberg - February 18, 2010 - 4:49 pm
At the UN moments ago, UN Special Envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton launched the a $1,441,547,920 humanitarian appeal for Haiti. This is the UN's organization's largest ever appeal for humanitarian assistance following a natural disaster.
At a meeting at the UN, Clinton delivered an impassioned appeal for international support for Haiti relief. He said the appeal was important for long term rebuilding, but the most immediate concern was to meet Haitians' basic needs. "You can't build a country back when a third of the people are living day-to-day...when people are worried about things like their children dying of dysentery in a camp," said Clinton. "We need to move them from living day-to-day to living month to month." He repeated that refrain a number of times, at one point banging the table for emphasis.
His job now is to help convince donors that their donations will be used effectively. To that end, he announced the launch of a website, Haitispecialenvoy.org, that will allow donors to track their funds. He also expressed his confidence in the Haitian government, which is an important thing considering that much of the funding will be used to support Haiti's crippled governing infrastructure. Clinton even cited a conversation he had with Haiti President Rene Preval in which Preval refused to lament the loss of his presidential palace, saying "everything from this day forward should be about the country we wish to become, not the country we used to be."
The report (pdf) that has accompanied the appeal contains some new facts and figures that give some perspective to the immense scale of the disaster. According to the document, 217,366 people are were killed in the earthquake and over 300,000 wounded. The amount of displacement is also staggering. Nearly 2 million people are living in "spontaneous settlements," both in Port au Prince and in the rural environs. The $1.44 billion appeal is intended to provide relief to the affected population and set the stage for Haiti's long term recovery.
The full explanation and justification for that figure can be found in the 130 page report. Two things to keep in mind, though. First, about one-third of the appeal, or $480 million, is for food aid.
Before the earthquake Haiti was dependent on food aid. Now, even more so. (Again, this gets to Clinton's point about the need for moving people beyond living day-to-day). Second, this appeal will fold in the emergency $577 million "flash appeal" that was launched in the week following the earthquake. That appeal exceeded its overall funding mark earlier this week, meaning that the international community and donors now need to come up with an additional $760 million or so to meet Haiti's needs in areas ranging from food aid, to shelter, schooling, sanitation, etc for the next year.
This is an unprecedented undertaking. Fortunately, it is also unprecedented for someone as high profile as Bill Clinton to be leading the charge. As I've said before, one thing that Haiti has going for it is that Bill Clinton is in their corner. And if there is something in which President Clinton truly excels, it is fundraising. I must say, having just watched Bill Clinton brief the UN on the appeal, it is clear that despite his recent health scare, he is eager to put these talents to use on behalf of the Haitian people.
Mark Leon Goldberg - February 18, 2010 - 4:49 pm
At the UN moments ago, UN Special Envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton launched the a $1,441,547,920 humanitarian appeal for Haiti. This is the UN's organization's largest ever appeal for humanitarian assistance following a natural disaster.
At a meeting at the UN, Clinton delivered an impassioned appeal for international support for Haiti relief. He said the appeal was important for long term rebuilding, but the most immediate concern was to meet Haitians' basic needs. "You can't build a country back when a third of the people are living day-to-day...when people are worried about things like their children dying of dysentery in a camp," said Clinton. "We need to move them from living day-to-day to living month to month." He repeated that refrain a number of times, at one point banging the table for emphasis.
His job now is to help convince donors that their donations will be used effectively. To that end, he announced the launch of a website, Haitispecialenvoy.org, that will allow donors to track their funds. He also expressed his confidence in the Haitian government, which is an important thing considering that much of the funding will be used to support Haiti's crippled governing infrastructure. Clinton even cited a conversation he had with Haiti President Rene Preval in which Preval refused to lament the loss of his presidential palace, saying "everything from this day forward should be about the country we wish to become, not the country we used to be."
The report (pdf) that has accompanied the appeal contains some new facts and figures that give some perspective to the immense scale of the disaster. According to the document, 217,366 people are were killed in the earthquake and over 300,000 wounded. The amount of displacement is also staggering. Nearly 2 million people are living in "spontaneous settlements," both in Port au Prince and in the rural environs. The $1.44 billion appeal is intended to provide relief to the affected population and set the stage for Haiti's long term recovery.
The full explanation and justification for that figure can be found in the 130 page report. Two things to keep in mind, though. First, about one-third of the appeal, or $480 million, is for food aid.
Before the earthquake Haiti was dependent on food aid. Now, even more so. (Again, this gets to Clinton's point about the need for moving people beyond living day-to-day). Second, this appeal will fold in the emergency $577 million "flash appeal" that was launched in the week following the earthquake. That appeal exceeded its overall funding mark earlier this week, meaning that the international community and donors now need to come up with an additional $760 million or so to meet Haiti's needs in areas ranging from food aid, to shelter, schooling, sanitation, etc for the next year.
This is an unprecedented undertaking. Fortunately, it is also unprecedented for someone as high profile as Bill Clinton to be leading the charge. As I've said before, one thing that Haiti has going for it is that Bill Clinton is in their corner. And if there is something in which President Clinton truly excels, it is fundraising. I must say, having just watched Bill Clinton brief the UN on the appeal, it is clear that despite his recent health scare, he is eager to put these talents to use on behalf of the Haitian people.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Cuba's aid ignored by the media?
Go to Original (Al Jazeera English) >
By Tom Fawthrop in Havana
After the quake struck, Haiti's first medical aid came from Cuba
Among the many donor nations helping Haiti, Cuba and its medical teams have played a major role in treating earthquake victims.
Public health experts say the Cubans were the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and to revamp hospitals immediately after the earthquake struck.
However, their pivotal work in the health sector has received scant media coverage.
"It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact that Cuba had several hundred health personnel on the ground before any other country," said David Sanders, a professor of public health from Western Cape University in South Africa.
The Cuban team coordinator in Haiti, Dr Carlos Alberto Garcia, says the Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel have been working non-stop, day and night, with operating rooms open 18 hours a day.
During a visit to La Paz hospital in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Dr Mirta Roses, the director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) which is in charge of medical coordination between the Cuban doctors, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a host of health sector NGOs, described the aid provided by Cuban doctors as "excellent and marvellous".
La Paz is one of five hospitals in Haiti that is largely staffed by health professionals from Havana.
History of cooperation
Haiti and Cuba signed a medical cooperation agreement in 1998.
Before the earthquake struck, 344 Cuban health professionals were already present in Haiti, providing primary care and obstetrical services as well as operating to restore the sight of Haitians blinded by eye diseases.
More doctors were flown in shortly after the earthquake, as part of the rapid response Henry Reeve Medical Brigade of disaster specialists. The brigade has extensive experience in dealing with the aftermath of earthquakes, having responded to such disasters in China, Indonesia and Pakistan.
"In the case of Cuban doctors, they are rapid responders to disasters, because disaster management is an integral part of their training," explains Maria a Hamlin Zúniga, a public health specialist from Nicaragua.
"They are fully aware of the need to reduce risks by having people prepared to act in any disaster situation."
Cuban doctors have been organising medical facilities in three revamped and five field hospitals, five diagnostic centres, with a total of 22 different care posts aided by financial support from Venezuela.
They are also operating nine rehabilitation centres staffed by nearly 70 Cuban physical therapists and rehab specialists, in addition to the Haitian medical personnel.
The Cuban team has been assisted by 100 specialists from Venezuela, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Canada and 17 nuns.
Havana has also sent 400,000 tetanus vaccines for the wounded.
Eduardo Nuñez Valdes, a Cuban epidemiologist who is currently in Port-au-Prince, has stressed that the current unsanitary conditions could lead to an epidemic of parasitic and infectious diseases if not acted upon quickly.
Media silence
However, in reporting on the international aid effort, Western media have generally not ranked Cuba high on the list of donor nations.
One major international news agency's list of donor nations credited Cuba with sending over 30 doctors to Haiti, whereas the real figure stands at more than 350, including 280 young Haitian doctors who graduated from Cuba. The final figure accounts for a combined total of 930 health professionals in all Cuban medical teams making it the largest medical contingent on the ground.
Another batch if 200 Cuban-trained doctors from 24 countries in Africa and Latin American, and a dozen American doctors who graduated from Havana are currently en route to Haiti and will provide reinforcement to existing Cuban medical teams.
By comparison the internationally-renowned Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors without Borders) has approximately 269 health professionals working in Haiti. MSF is much better funded and has far more extensive medical supplies than the Cuban team.
Left out
But while representatives from MSF and the ICRC are frequently in front of television cameras discussing health priorities and medical needs, the Cuban medical teams are missing in the media coverage.
Richard Gott, the Guardian newspaper's former foreign editor and a Latin America specialist, explains: "Western media are programmed to be indifferent to aid that comes from unexpected places. In the Haitian case, the media have ignored not just the Cuban contribution, but also the efforts made by other Latin American countries."
Brazil is providing $70mn in funding for 10 urgent care units, 50 mobile units for emergency care, a laboratory and a hospital, among other health services.
Venezuela has cancelled all Haiti debt and has promised to supply oil free of charge until the country has recovered from the disaster.
Western NGOs employ media officers to ensure that the world knows what they are doing.
According to Gott, the Western media has grown accustomed to dealing with such NGOs, enabling a relationship of mutual assistance to develop.
Cuban medical teams, however, are outside this predominantly Western humanitarian-media loop and are therefore only likely to receive attention from Latin American media and Spanish language broadcasters and print media.
There have, however, been notable exceptions to this reporting syndrome. On January 19, a CNN reporter broke the silence on the Cuban role in Haiti with a report on Cuban doctors at La Paz hospital.
Cuba/US cooperation
When the US requested that their military planes be allowed to fly through Cuban airspace for the purpose of evacuating Haitians to hospitals in Florida, Cuba immediately agreed despite almost 50 years of animosity between the two countries.
Josefina Vidal, the director of the Cuban foreign ministry's North America department, issued a statement declaring that: "Cuba is ready to cooperate with all the nations on the ground, including the US, to help the Haitian people and save more lives."
This deal cut the flight time of medical evacuation flights from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's southern tip to Miami by 90 minutes.
According to Darby Holladay, the US state department's spokesperson, the US has also communicated its readiness to make medical relief supplies available to Cuban doctors in Haiti.
"Potential US-Cuban cooperation could go a long way toward meeting Haiti's needs," says Dr Julie Feinsilver, the author of Healing the Masses - a book about Cuban health diplomacy, who argues that maximum cooperation is urgently needed.
Rich in human resources
Although Cuba is a poor developing country, their wealth of human resources - doctors, engineers and disaster management experts - has enabled this small Caribbean nation to play a global role in health care and humanitarian aid alongside the far richer nations of the west.
Cuban medical teams played a key role in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and provided the largest contingent of doctors after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake.
They also stayed the longest among international medical teams treating the victims of the 2006 Indonesian earthquake.
In the Pakistan relief operation the US and Europe dispatched medical teams. Each had a base camp with most doctors deployed for a month.
The Cubans, however, deployed seven major base camps, operated 32 field hospitals and stayed for six months.
Bruno Rodriguez, who is now Cuba's foreign minister, headed the mission - living in the mountains of Pakistan for more than six months.
Just after the Indonesian earthquake a year later, I met with Indonesia's then regional health co-coordinator, Dr Ronny Rockito.
Cuba had sent 135 health workers and two field hospitals. Rockito said that while the medical teams from other countries departed after just one month, he asked the Cuban medical team to extend their stay.
"I appreciate the Cuban medical team. Their style is very friendly."
Their medical standard is very high," he told me.
"The Cuban [field] hospitals are fully complete and it's free, with no financial support from our government."
Rockito says he never expected to see Cuban doctors coming to his country's rescue."We felt very surprised about doctors coming from a poor country, a country so far away that we know little about.
"We can learn from the Cuban health system. They are very fast to handle injuries and fractures. They x-ray, then they operate straight away."
A 'new dawn'?
The Montreal summit, the first gathering of 20 donor nations, agreed to hold a major conference on Haiti's future at the United Nations in March.
Some analysts see Haiti's rehabilitation as a potential opportunity for the US and Cuba to bypass their ideological differences and combine their resources - the US has the logistics while Cuba has the human resources - to help Haiti.
Feinsilver is convinced that "Cuba should be given a seat at the table with all other nations and multilateral organisations and agencies in any and all meetings to discuss, plan and coordinate aid efforts for Haiti's reconstruction".
"This would be in recognition of Cuba's long-standing policy and practise of medical diplomacy, as well as its general development aid to Haiti," she says.
But, will Haiti offer the US administration, which has Cuba on its list of nations that allegedly "support terrorism", a "new dawn" in its relations with Cuba?
In late January, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, thanked Cuba for its efforts in Haiti and welcomed further assistance and co-operation.
In Haiti's grand reconstruction plan, Feinsilver argues, "there can be no imposition of systems from any country, agency or institution.
The Haitian people themselves, through what remains of their government and NGOs, must provide the policy direction, and Cuba has been and should continue to be a key player in the health sector in Haiti".
By Tom Fawthrop in Havana
After the quake struck, Haiti's first medical aid came from Cuba
Among the many donor nations helping Haiti, Cuba and its medical teams have played a major role in treating earthquake victims.
Public health experts say the Cubans were the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and to revamp hospitals immediately after the earthquake struck.
However, their pivotal work in the health sector has received scant media coverage.
"It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact that Cuba had several hundred health personnel on the ground before any other country," said David Sanders, a professor of public health from Western Cape University in South Africa.
The Cuban team coordinator in Haiti, Dr Carlos Alberto Garcia, says the Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel have been working non-stop, day and night, with operating rooms open 18 hours a day.
During a visit to La Paz hospital in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Dr Mirta Roses, the director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) which is in charge of medical coordination between the Cuban doctors, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a host of health sector NGOs, described the aid provided by Cuban doctors as "excellent and marvellous".
La Paz is one of five hospitals in Haiti that is largely staffed by health professionals from Havana.
History of cooperation
Haiti and Cuba signed a medical cooperation agreement in 1998.
Before the earthquake struck, 344 Cuban health professionals were already present in Haiti, providing primary care and obstetrical services as well as operating to restore the sight of Haitians blinded by eye diseases.
More doctors were flown in shortly after the earthquake, as part of the rapid response Henry Reeve Medical Brigade of disaster specialists. The brigade has extensive experience in dealing with the aftermath of earthquakes, having responded to such disasters in China, Indonesia and Pakistan.
"In the case of Cuban doctors, they are rapid responders to disasters, because disaster management is an integral part of their training," explains Maria a Hamlin Zúniga, a public health specialist from Nicaragua.
"They are fully aware of the need to reduce risks by having people prepared to act in any disaster situation."
Cuban doctors have been organising medical facilities in three revamped and five field hospitals, five diagnostic centres, with a total of 22 different care posts aided by financial support from Venezuela.
They are also operating nine rehabilitation centres staffed by nearly 70 Cuban physical therapists and rehab specialists, in addition to the Haitian medical personnel.
The Cuban team has been assisted by 100 specialists from Venezuela, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Canada and 17 nuns.
Havana has also sent 400,000 tetanus vaccines for the wounded.
Eduardo Nuñez Valdes, a Cuban epidemiologist who is currently in Port-au-Prince, has stressed that the current unsanitary conditions could lead to an epidemic of parasitic and infectious diseases if not acted upon quickly.
Media silence
However, in reporting on the international aid effort, Western media have generally not ranked Cuba high on the list of donor nations.
One major international news agency's list of donor nations credited Cuba with sending over 30 doctors to Haiti, whereas the real figure stands at more than 350, including 280 young Haitian doctors who graduated from Cuba. The final figure accounts for a combined total of 930 health professionals in all Cuban medical teams making it the largest medical contingent on the ground.
Another batch if 200 Cuban-trained doctors from 24 countries in Africa and Latin American, and a dozen American doctors who graduated from Havana are currently en route to Haiti and will provide reinforcement to existing Cuban medical teams.
By comparison the internationally-renowned Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors without Borders) has approximately 269 health professionals working in Haiti. MSF is much better funded and has far more extensive medical supplies than the Cuban team.
Left out
But while representatives from MSF and the ICRC are frequently in front of television cameras discussing health priorities and medical needs, the Cuban medical teams are missing in the media coverage.
Richard Gott, the Guardian newspaper's former foreign editor and a Latin America specialist, explains: "Western media are programmed to be indifferent to aid that comes from unexpected places. In the Haitian case, the media have ignored not just the Cuban contribution, but also the efforts made by other Latin American countries."
Brazil is providing $70mn in funding for 10 urgent care units, 50 mobile units for emergency care, a laboratory and a hospital, among other health services.
Venezuela has cancelled all Haiti debt and has promised to supply oil free of charge until the country has recovered from the disaster.
Western NGOs employ media officers to ensure that the world knows what they are doing.
According to Gott, the Western media has grown accustomed to dealing with such NGOs, enabling a relationship of mutual assistance to develop.
Cuban medical teams, however, are outside this predominantly Western humanitarian-media loop and are therefore only likely to receive attention from Latin American media and Spanish language broadcasters and print media.
There have, however, been notable exceptions to this reporting syndrome. On January 19, a CNN reporter broke the silence on the Cuban role in Haiti with a report on Cuban doctors at La Paz hospital.
Cuba/US cooperation
When the US requested that their military planes be allowed to fly through Cuban airspace for the purpose of evacuating Haitians to hospitals in Florida, Cuba immediately agreed despite almost 50 years of animosity between the two countries.
Josefina Vidal, the director of the Cuban foreign ministry's North America department, issued a statement declaring that: "Cuba is ready to cooperate with all the nations on the ground, including the US, to help the Haitian people and save more lives."
This deal cut the flight time of medical evacuation flights from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's southern tip to Miami by 90 minutes.
According to Darby Holladay, the US state department's spokesperson, the US has also communicated its readiness to make medical relief supplies available to Cuban doctors in Haiti.
"Potential US-Cuban cooperation could go a long way toward meeting Haiti's needs," says Dr Julie Feinsilver, the author of Healing the Masses - a book about Cuban health diplomacy, who argues that maximum cooperation is urgently needed.
Rich in human resources
Although Cuba is a poor developing country, their wealth of human resources - doctors, engineers and disaster management experts - has enabled this small Caribbean nation to play a global role in health care and humanitarian aid alongside the far richer nations of the west.
Cuban medical teams played a key role in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and provided the largest contingent of doctors after the 2005 Pakistan earthquake.
They also stayed the longest among international medical teams treating the victims of the 2006 Indonesian earthquake.
In the Pakistan relief operation the US and Europe dispatched medical teams. Each had a base camp with most doctors deployed for a month.
The Cubans, however, deployed seven major base camps, operated 32 field hospitals and stayed for six months.
Bruno Rodriguez, who is now Cuba's foreign minister, headed the mission - living in the mountains of Pakistan for more than six months.
Just after the Indonesian earthquake a year later, I met with Indonesia's then regional health co-coordinator, Dr Ronny Rockito.
Cuba had sent 135 health workers and two field hospitals. Rockito said that while the medical teams from other countries departed after just one month, he asked the Cuban medical team to extend their stay.
"I appreciate the Cuban medical team. Their style is very friendly."
Their medical standard is very high," he told me.
"The Cuban [field] hospitals are fully complete and it's free, with no financial support from our government."
Rockito says he never expected to see Cuban doctors coming to his country's rescue."We felt very surprised about doctors coming from a poor country, a country so far away that we know little about.
"We can learn from the Cuban health system. They are very fast to handle injuries and fractures. They x-ray, then they operate straight away."
A 'new dawn'?
The Montreal summit, the first gathering of 20 donor nations, agreed to hold a major conference on Haiti's future at the United Nations in March.
Some analysts see Haiti's rehabilitation as a potential opportunity for the US and Cuba to bypass their ideological differences and combine their resources - the US has the logistics while Cuba has the human resources - to help Haiti.
Feinsilver is convinced that "Cuba should be given a seat at the table with all other nations and multilateral organisations and agencies in any and all meetings to discuss, plan and coordinate aid efforts for Haiti's reconstruction".
"This would be in recognition of Cuba's long-standing policy and practise of medical diplomacy, as well as its general development aid to Haiti," she says.
But, will Haiti offer the US administration, which has Cuba on its list of nations that allegedly "support terrorism", a "new dawn" in its relations with Cuba?
In late January, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, thanked Cuba for its efforts in Haiti and welcomed further assistance and co-operation.
In Haiti's grand reconstruction plan, Feinsilver argues, "there can be no imposition of systems from any country, agency or institution.
The Haitian people themselves, through what remains of their government and NGOs, must provide the policy direction, and Cuba has been and should continue to be a key player in the health sector in Haiti".
Scientologists looking for converts in Haiti
Published 03 February, 2010, 01:27
Our Scientology sources tell us there's an interesting reason that some members of the church are swarming into Haiti.
The Scientologists are taking up landing time slots, which is holding up doctors that are trying to get into the country to provide medical assistance for the citizens of Haiti.
Many of the Haitians are very spiritual and are asking the Scientologists to leave them alone.
Members of the Church of Scientology have arrived in Haiti - bringing aid, but also looking for new members. Members of the Church of Scientology, led by John Travolta, have flown to Haiti to work in disaster relief.
Travolta himself flew a plane carrying supplies and medical professionals to the devastated island and arranged for another plane.
In addition to the much needed aid, Travolta’s plan also carried 50 Scientologist volunteers, some of which may be hoping to cultivate new members.
An email making the rounds of Scientologists recently asks for financial help to support church members going to conduct training seminars in Port au Prince.
Arriving on the scene of a disaster is not unusual for Scientologists.
The founder of the church, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote about a strategy called “Casualty Contact,” which advocates searching out victims of tragedy as potential converts.
Today this strategy is called the Volunteer Minister’s program.
The distinctive yellow tents of the program have been seen at Ground Zero in the days following the 9/11 attacks, the subway attacks in London as well as the massacre in the Russian city of Beslan.
After seeing their work, officials from the Russian ministry of health asked the volunteers to leave, saying their methods were unhelpful to the traumatized children.
“Wherever there is a disaster, you will find a bunch of scientologists in bright yellow t-shirts,” said Ravi Somaiya, an editor with Gawker.com who uncovered this story. “They believe they are doing good. They believe the only way to true happiness is through Scientology.”
However, others on the ground say that Scientologist are taking landing slots at Port au Prince’s strapped airport from Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups.
“Wherever there is a disaster, you will find a bunch of scientologists in bright yellow t-shirts,” said Ravi Somaiya, an editor with Gawker.com who uncovered this story. “They believe they are doing good. They believe the only way to true happiness is through Scientology.”
However, others on the ground say that Scientologist are taking landing slots at Port au Prince’s strapped airport from Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups.
They are also rumored to be getting in the way of victims trying to get medical treatment, for example, trying to talk to people being prepped for surgery.
“They are not sending people who speak Creole, they are doing a lot of touching are just adding to the confusion on the ground,” said Somaiya. “It’s not overtly doing harm, but it’s not what people need at this time,” he added.
Scientology was founded in 1953 by Hubbard, a science fiction writer.
“They are not sending people who speak Creole, they are doing a lot of touching are just adding to the confusion on the ground,” said Somaiya. “It’s not overtly doing harm, but it’s not what people need at this time,” he added.
Scientology was founded in 1953 by Hubbard, a science fiction writer.
It has been banned in France and several other countries, including and Germany, consider it a commercial organization rather than a religion.
Major Scientologist tenets include a belief in reincarnation, life on other planets and a skepticism of psychiatry and other medical treatments.
France pledges $450m to Haiti
Go To Original (Al Jazeera English) >
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has pledged an aid and debt relief package amounting to about $450m to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
The amount includes a cancellation of Haiti's debt to France of $77m, Sarkozy said during a brief visit to the Caribbean nation on Wednesday.
Sarkozy arrived in Haiti to support international relief efforts after last month's deadly earthquake which killed around 230,000 people and left more than a million homeless.
His visit is the first ever by a French president to the former French slave colony, which fought for and won its independence in 1804, becoming the first independent black republic.
Staying in Haiti for less than four hours, Sarkozy greeted French embassy staff and aid workers and took a helicopter tour to see the extent of damage left by last month's quake.
Later speaking alongside Rene Preval, the Haitian president, Sarkozy said he wanted to turn the page in France's long history of troubled relations with its former colony.
But for many Haitians, Sarkozy's visit highlighted the bitter legacy of the price paid by Haiti to secure its freedom from French rule.
Following a succesful revolt in 1804, Haiti was forced to pay compensation to France – a debt that took more than half a century to pay off.
'Clear responsibility'
In today's money the payments amount to more than $20bn.
For many Haitians those payments are what set the seal on Haiti's endemic poverty and at a demonstration on Wednesday hundreds of Haitian protesters called on France to pay back the money.
"France has played an important role in the way the country is suffering economically, and it has a clear responsibility to pay reparations," Camille Chalmers, a Haitian economist, told Al Jazeera.
During his visit Sarkozy acknowledged that France and Haiti had had a troubled relationship, saying he was conscious that France "did not leave a good legacy" in its former colony.
"We are staring at history in its face, we have not discarded it and we assume responsibility," he said.
However, asked by Al Jazeera about the issue of reparations for Haiti's post-independence payments to France he appeared dismissive.
"Non, non, non (No, no, no)", he said.
'New era'
Al Jazeera's Steve Chao, reporting from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, said that French officials hoped that the visit "will summon a new era between France and its former colony".
"Sarkozy and his people are very much cognisant of the fact that Haitians hold a lot of suspicion and resentment over its former brutal years of slavery as a colony and over feelings that France has continued to meddle in politics on this island in more recent years," he said.
Sarkozy surveyed the devastated Haitian capital and other affected areas by helicopter, and was also to visit a French-run field hospital.
He was also due to meet Haiti's leaders to offer France's financial support for a plan for post-quake recovery and reconstruction that is being put together by foreign donors with the Haitian government.
Economists from the Inter-American Development Bank have estimated the cost of rebuilding Haiti after the quake, which killed more than 200,000 people and left more than one million homeless, could reach nearly $14 billion, making it proportionately the most destructive natural disaster in modern times.
Besides providing immediate emergency aid to the hurt and homeless from the quake, international donors are looking to support Haiti's long-term recovery to try to pull the country out of a cycle of poverty and political instability.
While aid workers rush to distribute tarpaulins before the rainy season starts, the United Nations says only about 272,000 people have been provided with shelter materials so far.
Missionaries freed
In a separate development late on Wednesday, a Haitian judge ordered the release of eight American missionaries who had been charged with child kidnapping.
The eight were expected to be flown out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, aboard a US military transport plane.
Two others remain in detention after the judge said he wanted to question them about previous visits to the country.
The ten missionaries were arrested last month after trying to take 33 children out of the country without proper documentation.
The group members have denied any wrongdoing.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has pledged an aid and debt relief package amounting to about $450m to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
The amount includes a cancellation of Haiti's debt to France of $77m, Sarkozy said during a brief visit to the Caribbean nation on Wednesday.
Sarkozy arrived in Haiti to support international relief efforts after last month's deadly earthquake which killed around 230,000 people and left more than a million homeless.
His visit is the first ever by a French president to the former French slave colony, which fought for and won its independence in 1804, becoming the first independent black republic.
Staying in Haiti for less than four hours, Sarkozy greeted French embassy staff and aid workers and took a helicopter tour to see the extent of damage left by last month's quake.
Later speaking alongside Rene Preval, the Haitian president, Sarkozy said he wanted to turn the page in France's long history of troubled relations with its former colony.
But for many Haitians, Sarkozy's visit highlighted the bitter legacy of the price paid by Haiti to secure its freedom from French rule.
Following a succesful revolt in 1804, Haiti was forced to pay compensation to France – a debt that took more than half a century to pay off.
'Clear responsibility'
In today's money the payments amount to more than $20bn.
For many Haitians those payments are what set the seal on Haiti's endemic poverty and at a demonstration on Wednesday hundreds of Haitian protesters called on France to pay back the money.
"France has played an important role in the way the country is suffering economically, and it has a clear responsibility to pay reparations," Camille Chalmers, a Haitian economist, told Al Jazeera.
During his visit Sarkozy acknowledged that France and Haiti had had a troubled relationship, saying he was conscious that France "did not leave a good legacy" in its former colony.
"We are staring at history in its face, we have not discarded it and we assume responsibility," he said.
However, asked by Al Jazeera about the issue of reparations for Haiti's post-independence payments to France he appeared dismissive.
"Non, non, non (No, no, no)", he said.
'New era'
Al Jazeera's Steve Chao, reporting from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, said that French officials hoped that the visit "will summon a new era between France and its former colony".
"Sarkozy and his people are very much cognisant of the fact that Haitians hold a lot of suspicion and resentment over its former brutal years of slavery as a colony and over feelings that France has continued to meddle in politics on this island in more recent years," he said.
Sarkozy surveyed the devastated Haitian capital and other affected areas by helicopter, and was also to visit a French-run field hospital.
He was also due to meet Haiti's leaders to offer France's financial support for a plan for post-quake recovery and reconstruction that is being put together by foreign donors with the Haitian government.
Economists from the Inter-American Development Bank have estimated the cost of rebuilding Haiti after the quake, which killed more than 200,000 people and left more than one million homeless, could reach nearly $14 billion, making it proportionately the most destructive natural disaster in modern times.
Besides providing immediate emergency aid to the hurt and homeless from the quake, international donors are looking to support Haiti's long-term recovery to try to pull the country out of a cycle of poverty and political instability.
While aid workers rush to distribute tarpaulins before the rainy season starts, the United Nations says only about 272,000 people have been provided with shelter materials so far.
Missionaries freed
In a separate development late on Wednesday, a Haitian judge ordered the release of eight American missionaries who had been charged with child kidnapping.
The eight were expected to be flown out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, aboard a US military transport plane.
Two others remain in detention after the judge said he wanted to question them about previous visits to the country.
The ten missionaries were arrested last month after trying to take 33 children out of the country without proper documentation.
The group members have denied any wrongdoing.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Haiti's earthquake camps turning into shanty towns
Go To Original (AP) >
In the five weeks since the quake struck, aid workers, officials and Haiti's government have debated where and how the 1.2 million people left homeless by the disaster should live. Should they be given ready-made tents or plastic tarps? What land should be made available to house them?
A long-delayed announcement on where government camps might go could be made Thursday.
But the people are not waiting. On a former landing strip-turned-boulevard called Route de Piste a cluster of ramshackle villages is rising.
Row upon row of corrugated tin and wood shacks stand against the wind as dusty men walk between them carrying saws and hammers. Children look for the snow cone man at the crossroads, near where a lottery dealer named Max has set up his booth. In a shack marked "Boulangerie Pep La" — the people's bakery — the smell of dough wafts from the oven, and two flat rolls cost 5 gourdes, about 12 cents.
These shanty towns are redrawing the map of the capital, filling open fields with new versions of the joyful life and harsh crime and abuse that always marked existence in the slums — with an extra helping of disease, hunger and misery brought on by the Jan. 12 disaster, which killed more than 200,000 people.
This means people are planning to stay in some very dangerous places: at the bottom of hillsides they know will collapse in a heavy rain or near riverbeds that are bound to flood. They are crowded into polluted areas where sanitation is limited and disease is already starting to spread.
"The government has said for weeks that they have identified sites, but time is getting short and there has been little progress," said Ian Bray, an Oxfam spokesman.
That's one problem. Another is that people simply do not want to go far from where they always lived and worked. With property hard to come by, aftershocks continuing and 38 percent of Port-au-Prince's buildings destroyed by the magnitude-7 quake, according to U.N. satellite imagery, their options are limited.
"People are displaced, they've lost their homes but they haven't lost their jobs," said Alex Wynter of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. "The key issue is land."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, making the first visit ever by a French head of state to his nation's former colony, pledged 16,000 tarps and 1,000 tents to house 200,000 people while touring the ruins of Port-au-Prince's collapsed national palace.
Haiti's own leader, President Rene Preval, has been less decisive.
"We have to find a solution to get people under shelter — a combination of tents, tarps, corrugated tin roofs ... whatever combination it is," Preval told The Associated Press during a half-hour interview this week. He did not elaborate.
For the people now living under a big flagpole, the decision has already been made.
"If they chase after us, we'll leave. Until then we're here," said Lens Beny, a 20-year-old water peddler who built an 8-by-9-foot wood and tin shack for himself and five relatives. His front door is a lace curtain; the roof is a garbage bag that leaves a solid third of the shanty exposed to the sky.
It is, in a manner of speaking, a temporary shelter — the sort officials are counting on people to build as 250,000 tarps are handed out ahead of the spring rainy season and more permanent solutions are reached.
It's also an unpleasant place to live. One recent rain shower destroyed the flimsy particle boards he bought for $3.70 each, Beny said, as he ripped off a clump of wall.
The new neighborhood is very densely packed; some 27,000 people live there, according to Haitian Red Cross workers. U.N., foreign and local officials are directing aid to the site, while also designating it a "priority for decongestion" — meaning some people must move out.
The overcrowding is the chief reason officials say they don't want to give people the waterproof tents they are demanding — there just isn't enough space for them.
So people like Beny have taken things into their own hands. As he replaced his family's makeshift tent with an even bigger makeshift house, he pushed out the neighbors whose space he needed.
Residents say some men are hoarding food coupons the U.N. World Food Program devised to ensure the flow of food aid, selling them for $4 or more. There are allegations of beatings and robberies. One group stole a Red Cross shelter and tried to camouflage it with a sign advertising it as "National School Jan. 12, founded Feb. 7, 2010." (The Red Cross got it back.)
There is also talk of rape. One group of residents said men were using food coupons to pay for sex with women living in the camp, and assaulting them if they don't agree.
"There is no security. There are never police, U.S. soldiers or U.N.," said Dr. Kobel Dubique, a doctor with Boston-based Partners in Health, which is running a clinic in the camp.
Such crimes were common in the nearby stretch of oceanside slums that includes the sprawling Cite Soleil, especially a few years ago before U.N. peacekeepers moved in and the gangs were driven out.
But until five weeks ago, this was a fenced-in park. The area, dominated by a former airstrip of the disbanded Haitian military, was to have been turned into a residential zone under former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He went into exile amid a rebellion in 2004, and except for a single concrete apartment building and the flagpole, the area remained empty until the quake.
During his visit, Sarkozy also pledged that France will spend a total of 326 million euros ($443 million) on Haitian aid the next two years. That amount includes the cancellation of Haiti's 56 million euro debt to France and 40 million euros in aid planned before the quake.
The question now is not just what comes next, but how fast. The immensity of tackling what Inter-American Development Bank economists say is the worst disaster of 2,000 they examined in a study released Tuesday — a list that includes the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and 1972 Nicaragua earthquake — cannot be understated.
The people of Port-au-Prince, millions of whom survive on less than $2 a day, cannot wait for problems to be sorted out by a government that has never succeeded in addressing them before.
Morning talk shows like Radio Caraibe's "Caribbean Morning" took calls Wednesday from listeners on how to rebuild. Warned to wait for official sanction to rebuild, one caller asked why the quake-damaged police station in his neighborhood was being restored if he couldn't work on his home. Preval often appears visibly worried about the problem. After a recent meeting with a U.S. legislative delegation led by House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he pulled an aide aside and talked in grave tones about the "million people on the streets."
But he isn't saying what they are going to do.
U.S. lawmakers brought up the issue with Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive during the meeting last week, but did not get a solution, said Sen. George LeMieux of Florida.
"We urged the president to take measures and make decisions quickly," the Republican senator told the AP in a telephone interview. "I am very concerned that with the Haitian people in these camps ... that we are going to have a second tragedy soon."
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — First there was an empty field. Then came rows of makeshift tents. Now those camps are turning into shanty towns — with bakeries, lottery stands and homes — that show no sign of moving soon.
In the five weeks since the quake struck, aid workers, officials and Haiti's government have debated where and how the 1.2 million people left homeless by the disaster should live. Should they be given ready-made tents or plastic tarps? What land should be made available to house them?
A long-delayed announcement on where government camps might go could be made Thursday.
But the people are not waiting. On a former landing strip-turned-boulevard called Route de Piste a cluster of ramshackle villages is rising.
Row upon row of corrugated tin and wood shacks stand against the wind as dusty men walk between them carrying saws and hammers. Children look for the snow cone man at the crossroads, near where a lottery dealer named Max has set up his booth. In a shack marked "Boulangerie Pep La" — the people's bakery — the smell of dough wafts from the oven, and two flat rolls cost 5 gourdes, about 12 cents.
These shanty towns are redrawing the map of the capital, filling open fields with new versions of the joyful life and harsh crime and abuse that always marked existence in the slums — with an extra helping of disease, hunger and misery brought on by the Jan. 12 disaster, which killed more than 200,000 people.
This means people are planning to stay in some very dangerous places: at the bottom of hillsides they know will collapse in a heavy rain or near riverbeds that are bound to flood. They are crowded into polluted areas where sanitation is limited and disease is already starting to spread.
"The government has said for weeks that they have identified sites, but time is getting short and there has been little progress," said Ian Bray, an Oxfam spokesman.
That's one problem. Another is that people simply do not want to go far from where they always lived and worked. With property hard to come by, aftershocks continuing and 38 percent of Port-au-Prince's buildings destroyed by the magnitude-7 quake, according to U.N. satellite imagery, their options are limited.
"People are displaced, they've lost their homes but they haven't lost their jobs," said Alex Wynter of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. "The key issue is land."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, making the first visit ever by a French head of state to his nation's former colony, pledged 16,000 tarps and 1,000 tents to house 200,000 people while touring the ruins of Port-au-Prince's collapsed national palace.
Haiti's own leader, President Rene Preval, has been less decisive.
"We have to find a solution to get people under shelter — a combination of tents, tarps, corrugated tin roofs ... whatever combination it is," Preval told The Associated Press during a half-hour interview this week. He did not elaborate.
For the people now living under a big flagpole, the decision has already been made.
"If they chase after us, we'll leave. Until then we're here," said Lens Beny, a 20-year-old water peddler who built an 8-by-9-foot wood and tin shack for himself and five relatives. His front door is a lace curtain; the roof is a garbage bag that leaves a solid third of the shanty exposed to the sky.
It is, in a manner of speaking, a temporary shelter — the sort officials are counting on people to build as 250,000 tarps are handed out ahead of the spring rainy season and more permanent solutions are reached.
It's also an unpleasant place to live. One recent rain shower destroyed the flimsy particle boards he bought for $3.70 each, Beny said, as he ripped off a clump of wall.
The new neighborhood is very densely packed; some 27,000 people live there, according to Haitian Red Cross workers. U.N., foreign and local officials are directing aid to the site, while also designating it a "priority for decongestion" — meaning some people must move out.
The overcrowding is the chief reason officials say they don't want to give people the waterproof tents they are demanding — there just isn't enough space for them.
So people like Beny have taken things into their own hands. As he replaced his family's makeshift tent with an even bigger makeshift house, he pushed out the neighbors whose space he needed.
Residents say some men are hoarding food coupons the U.N. World Food Program devised to ensure the flow of food aid, selling them for $4 or more. There are allegations of beatings and robberies. One group stole a Red Cross shelter and tried to camouflage it with a sign advertising it as "National School Jan. 12, founded Feb. 7, 2010." (The Red Cross got it back.)
There is also talk of rape. One group of residents said men were using food coupons to pay for sex with women living in the camp, and assaulting them if they don't agree.
"There is no security. There are never police, U.S. soldiers or U.N.," said Dr. Kobel Dubique, a doctor with Boston-based Partners in Health, which is running a clinic in the camp.
Such crimes were common in the nearby stretch of oceanside slums that includes the sprawling Cite Soleil, especially a few years ago before U.N. peacekeepers moved in and the gangs were driven out.
But until five weeks ago, this was a fenced-in park. The area, dominated by a former airstrip of the disbanded Haitian military, was to have been turned into a residential zone under former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He went into exile amid a rebellion in 2004, and except for a single concrete apartment building and the flagpole, the area remained empty until the quake.
During his visit, Sarkozy also pledged that France will spend a total of 326 million euros ($443 million) on Haitian aid the next two years. That amount includes the cancellation of Haiti's 56 million euro debt to France and 40 million euros in aid planned before the quake.
The question now is not just what comes next, but how fast. The immensity of tackling what Inter-American Development Bank economists say is the worst disaster of 2,000 they examined in a study released Tuesday — a list that includes the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and 1972 Nicaragua earthquake — cannot be understated.
The people of Port-au-Prince, millions of whom survive on less than $2 a day, cannot wait for problems to be sorted out by a government that has never succeeded in addressing them before.
Morning talk shows like Radio Caraibe's "Caribbean Morning" took calls Wednesday from listeners on how to rebuild. Warned to wait for official sanction to rebuild, one caller asked why the quake-damaged police station in his neighborhood was being restored if he couldn't work on his home. Preval often appears visibly worried about the problem. After a recent meeting with a U.S. legislative delegation led by House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he pulled an aide aside and talked in grave tones about the "million people on the streets."
But he isn't saying what they are going to do.
U.S. lawmakers brought up the issue with Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive during the meeting last week, but did not get a solution, said Sen. George LeMieux of Florida.
"We urged the president to take measures and make decisions quickly," the Republican senator told the AP in a telephone interview. "I am very concerned that with the Haitian people in these camps ... that we are going to have a second tragedy soon."
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Injured Haitian earthquake survivors' fate is unclear after treatment in the U.S.
Go to Original (Washington Post) >
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
MIAMI -- From down the hall, a high-pitched voice speaking Haitian Creole came booming into Clermond Junior's little hospital room.
"Junior, sak pase?" -- what's happening?
Myrtho Gracia, a Haitian American nurse, sashayed through the door holding a blue plastic-foam box over her head like a waitress and carried on as though she and Junior were in the middle of Port-au-Prince. "we have curried chicken for you."
Junior, 19, smiled for the first time in hours. "I will enjoy this," he said in Creole, turning away from the half-eaten lunch prepared at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He seemed to forget for a second that half of his body was broken, that his useless left arm lay on his lap like a dinner napkin, that he could slide his thin left leg only a few centimeters, that his slowly healing head wounds, opened by the wall that buried him for two days in Haiti, itched like crazy. He eyed the greasy chicken curry. "I never had it, but I know I will like it."
America is another experience that Junior has never known but is certain he will like.
"Haiti is gone. Haiti is no more," he said, describing the rush of emotion he felt while viewing pictures of the devastation on a news Web site. In Haiti, he had few employment opportunities even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, and now his mother sleeps outdoors there because their house collapsed.
He is ready to embrace America, a fabled land that people in his Port-Au-Prince neighborhood could only talk about. In Miami, his life and his limbs were saved by his Haitian American doctor, Angelo Gousse. Haitian American workers, of which there are many at Jackson Memorial, often stop by to chat, treating him like family.
But Junior isn't part of the American family, and there are questions over whether he should stay here. Gracia would like an answer, saying she would take him in if she could. Opponents of illegal immigration would also like an answer. Some say Haitians should not have been brought to the United States for treatment, while others say they deserve medical attention but should be flown back as soon as they recover.
The question -- stay or go? -- could become a major headache for the Obama administration. Unlike Cubans, Haitian immigrants are often unwelcome in the United States, a double standard with roots in Cold War politics. But advocates for the patients point out that Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, lacked adequate health care even in the best of times and that the injured who were saved might be sent back to die.
An uncertain fate
The total number of patients brought to South and Central Florida is about 500. Junior, with his wispy, boyish mustache and fuzzy sideburns crawling down his cheeks, is one of 105 Haitian nationals being treated at Jackson Memorial's Ryder Trauma Center. Hospital officials said charges for the Haiti patients total just under $7.7 million so far, nearly two-thirds of which has not been covered by insurance or other sources.
Some victims are babies without parents. And some are fairly well-known, like Romel Joseph, an esteemed violinist trained at the Julliard School, who survived a three-story fall from his New Victorian Music School during the quake. His back was impaled by carpenter nails in a wall, which crushed his left leg and broke three fingers on one hand.
Their presence in Florida has already generated controversy. Two weeks ago, medical airlifts from Haiti were halted when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) complained that, while the state was willing to help, the U.S. military was overburdening it with earthquake victims.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services activated the National Disaster Medical System, which reimburses hospitals for treatment costs. At the same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development started flying patients to Atlanta area hospitals and identified Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston as places willing to take patients.
But unresolved is the question of what the future holds for Haitians granted an array of visas to enter the United States. Will they be allowed to apply for Temporary Protective Status, forced to leave, or will some be allowed to walk out of the hospital and blend in with Haitian immigrants in their communities? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it has yet to determine how to track earthquake victims in this country once they're well.
Protecting her 'baby
Junior said he missed his mother, Suzanna Lindor, and his three sisters, who escaped the earthquake without harm. But, he said through an interpreter, "I would be dead if they had not brought me here." Gousse, his doctor, nodded in agreement.
On Jan. 12, Junior turned on the shower on the second floor of his house and climbed in after checking to see if the water was warm. He was talking to a friend through the curtain when the earth shook. They ran downstairs but didn't make it to the door before a wall and metal grate tumbled down, trapping them for nearly two days.
The falling debris crushed muscle, cracked bones and opened flesh. Dead tissue sent a toxin into Junior's body, causing his kidneys to fail. Gousse came across Junior at the University of Miami medical station set up near the Port-au-Prince airport six days after the earthquake.
"He was swollen," Gousse said. "His face was swollen. He's a thin guy. He was swollen twice his size. He couldn't make urine . . . and the liquid was building up in his body."
Junior needed kidney dialysis. "He didn't need surgery," Gousse said. "You just needed to take over the function of the kidney with a dialysis machine until it's better."
But Haiti couldn't provide that. "The way he looked to me, based on my clinical experience, he would not have made it more than 24 hours. He had difficulty breathing," Gousse said. On Jan. 18, Junior was flown to Miami and placed in Jackson Memorial's intensive care unit.
"He was the baby on my floor," Gracia said. Other Haitian American workers kept popping in to check on him. "We would babysit him," Gracia noted.
Last week, Junior had recovered enough to be released to the hospital's general care unit, and Gracia followed him.
"I have two sons, two grown kids, they're gone," said Gracia, who emigrated from Haiti when she was 18 and has worked at Jackson Memorial for 24 years.
"I am a proud Haitian." She looked down at Junior, a soft-spoken teenager whose future is as cloudy as the dust that shrouds Port-au-Prince.
"I don't mind to get him in my house," she said. "Especially him. He's the youngest guy to come into the ICU. Others have a wife. He's the kid of the floor."
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 16, 2010
MIAMI -- From down the hall, a high-pitched voice speaking Haitian Creole came booming into Clermond Junior's little hospital room.
"Junior, sak pase?" -- what's happening?
Myrtho Gracia, a Haitian American nurse, sashayed through the door holding a blue plastic-foam box over her head like a waitress and carried on as though she and Junior were in the middle of Port-au-Prince. "we have curried chicken for you."
Junior, 19, smiled for the first time in hours. "I will enjoy this," he said in Creole, turning away from the half-eaten lunch prepared at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He seemed to forget for a second that half of his body was broken, that his useless left arm lay on his lap like a dinner napkin, that he could slide his thin left leg only a few centimeters, that his slowly healing head wounds, opened by the wall that buried him for two days in Haiti, itched like crazy. He eyed the greasy chicken curry. "I never had it, but I know I will like it."
America is another experience that Junior has never known but is certain he will like.
"Haiti is gone. Haiti is no more," he said, describing the rush of emotion he felt while viewing pictures of the devastation on a news Web site. In Haiti, he had few employment opportunities even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, and now his mother sleeps outdoors there because their house collapsed.
He is ready to embrace America, a fabled land that people in his Port-Au-Prince neighborhood could only talk about. In Miami, his life and his limbs were saved by his Haitian American doctor, Angelo Gousse. Haitian American workers, of which there are many at Jackson Memorial, often stop by to chat, treating him like family.
But Junior isn't part of the American family, and there are questions over whether he should stay here. Gracia would like an answer, saying she would take him in if she could. Opponents of illegal immigration would also like an answer. Some say Haitians should not have been brought to the United States for treatment, while others say they deserve medical attention but should be flown back as soon as they recover.
The question -- stay or go? -- could become a major headache for the Obama administration. Unlike Cubans, Haitian immigrants are often unwelcome in the United States, a double standard with roots in Cold War politics. But advocates for the patients point out that Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, lacked adequate health care even in the best of times and that the injured who were saved might be sent back to die.
An uncertain fate
The total number of patients brought to South and Central Florida is about 500. Junior, with his wispy, boyish mustache and fuzzy sideburns crawling down his cheeks, is one of 105 Haitian nationals being treated at Jackson Memorial's Ryder Trauma Center. Hospital officials said charges for the Haiti patients total just under $7.7 million so far, nearly two-thirds of which has not been covered by insurance or other sources.
Some victims are babies without parents. And some are fairly well-known, like Romel Joseph, an esteemed violinist trained at the Julliard School, who survived a three-story fall from his New Victorian Music School during the quake. His back was impaled by carpenter nails in a wall, which crushed his left leg and broke three fingers on one hand.
Their presence in Florida has already generated controversy. Two weeks ago, medical airlifts from Haiti were halted when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) complained that, while the state was willing to help, the U.S. military was overburdening it with earthquake victims.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services activated the National Disaster Medical System, which reimburses hospitals for treatment costs. At the same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development started flying patients to Atlanta area hospitals and identified Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston as places willing to take patients.
But unresolved is the question of what the future holds for Haitians granted an array of visas to enter the United States. Will they be allowed to apply for Temporary Protective Status, forced to leave, or will some be allowed to walk out of the hospital and blend in with Haitian immigrants in their communities? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it has yet to determine how to track earthquake victims in this country once they're well.
Protecting her 'baby
Junior said he missed his mother, Suzanna Lindor, and his three sisters, who escaped the earthquake without harm. But, he said through an interpreter, "I would be dead if they had not brought me here." Gousse, his doctor, nodded in agreement.
On Jan. 12, Junior turned on the shower on the second floor of his house and climbed in after checking to see if the water was warm. He was talking to a friend through the curtain when the earth shook. They ran downstairs but didn't make it to the door before a wall and metal grate tumbled down, trapping them for nearly two days.
The falling debris crushed muscle, cracked bones and opened flesh. Dead tissue sent a toxin into Junior's body, causing his kidneys to fail. Gousse came across Junior at the University of Miami medical station set up near the Port-au-Prince airport six days after the earthquake.
"He was swollen," Gousse said. "His face was swollen. He's a thin guy. He was swollen twice his size. He couldn't make urine . . . and the liquid was building up in his body."
Junior needed kidney dialysis. "He didn't need surgery," Gousse said. "You just needed to take over the function of the kidney with a dialysis machine until it's better."
But Haiti couldn't provide that. "The way he looked to me, based on my clinical experience, he would not have made it more than 24 hours. He had difficulty breathing," Gousse said. On Jan. 18, Junior was flown to Miami and placed in Jackson Memorial's intensive care unit.
"He was the baby on my floor," Gracia said. Other Haitian American workers kept popping in to check on him. "We would babysit him," Gracia noted.
Last week, Junior had recovered enough to be released to the hospital's general care unit, and Gracia followed him.
"I have two sons, two grown kids, they're gone," said Gracia, who emigrated from Haiti when she was 18 and has worked at Jackson Memorial for 24 years.
"I am a proud Haitian." She looked down at Junior, a soft-spoken teenager whose future is as cloudy as the dust that shrouds Port-au-Prince.
"I don't mind to get him in my house," she said. "Especially him. He's the youngest guy to come into the ICU. Others have a wife. He's the kid of the floor."
Clinton denies being Haiti's de facto governor
Go to Original (RFI - Radio France International) >
Speaking after a visit to a clinic in the ruined capital of Port-au-Prince, he urged Haitians to undertake an ambitious reconstruction of their country and denied suggestions that he has become the country's effective governor.
"What I don't want to be is the governor of Haiti," he said. "I want to build the capacity of the country to chart its own course. They can trust me not to be a neocolonialist, I'm too old."
Clinton stressed that he was not in Haiti to intervene in the case of ten American Christians detained on kidnapping charges. They were denied conditional release on Friday, according to their lawyer, Edwin Coq.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that the US ambassador was working with Haitian officials on the case, and that Washington expressed "hope that this matter can be resolved in an expeditious way". "Obviously, this is a matter for the Haitian judicial system," she added.
There is a "strong movement" towards cancelling Haiti's death at the meeting of the G7 group of industrialised nations, according to Canadian Prime Minister Jim Flaherty.
Debt relief for the quake-hit country is on the agenda of the meeting which opened late Friday in the Iqualit, in Canada's far north.
Former US President Bill Clinton was met by angry Haitians protesting at the slow arrival of international aid to the country since the devastating earthquake three weeks ago. He denied suggestions that he has effectively taken over the running of the country.
Clinton, who last week was designated by the UN as co-ordinator of international aid, said he was sorry it had been so slow to be delivered to those in need.Speaking after a visit to a clinic in the ruined capital of Port-au-Prince, he urged Haitians to undertake an ambitious reconstruction of their country and denied suggestions that he has become the country's effective governor.
"What I don't want to be is the governor of Haiti," he said. "I want to build the capacity of the country to chart its own course. They can trust me not to be a neocolonialist, I'm too old."
Clinton stressed that he was not in Haiti to intervene in the case of ten American Christians detained on kidnapping charges. They were denied conditional release on Friday, according to their lawyer, Edwin Coq.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that the US ambassador was working with Haitian officials on the case, and that Washington expressed "hope that this matter can be resolved in an expeditious way". "Obviously, this is a matter for the Haitian judicial system," she added.
There is a "strong movement" towards cancelling Haiti's death at the meeting of the G7 group of industrialised nations, according to Canadian Prime Minister Jim Flaherty.
Debt relief for the quake-hit country is on the agenda of the meeting which opened late Friday in the Iqualit, in Canada's far north.
Haiti airport to reopen for big carriers on Friday
Go to Original >
The airport was turned over almost entirely to disaster relief and military flights after the January 12 earthquake, which destroyed hundreds of buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed 212,000 people.
The quake caused serious damage to the airport's terminal. Crews have repaired airport lighting and the part of the terminal that the airlines will use, Burke said.
"On the 19th American Airlines will resume operations in the west portion of the terminal," Burke said. "Structural engineers have checked out the terminal to make sure it's safe and it is safe to operate out of, and they're ready to go."
Air traffic control responsibilities, which were assumed by the U.S. military following the quake, are slowly being turned over to Haitian controllers. They are currently directing flights from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. and will expand those hours from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on February 19, Burke said.
Haiti's feeble economy was brought to a standstill by the quake, which left 1 million people homeless and living in the streets.
"This is a chance for them to generate revenue. This is how airports make money," Burke said.
At the peak of the disaster the airport had a capacity of 120 landings of military and relief aircraft daily. Those flights have dwindled to an average of about 70 daily in recent days, Burke said.
The airfield is being run out of a portable control tower brought to Haiti by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's international airport, a key economic lifeline for the poorest country in the Americas, will reopen to major commercial airlines on Friday for the first time since a massive earthquake destroyed its control tower, a U.S. military official said.
American Airlines will begin flying to Port-au-Prince on February 19, with Air Canada and Air France to follow shortly after, Brigadier General Darryl Burke, vice commander of Air Forces Southern, said in an interview over the weekend.The airport was turned over almost entirely to disaster relief and military flights after the January 12 earthquake, which destroyed hundreds of buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed 212,000 people.
The quake caused serious damage to the airport's terminal. Crews have repaired airport lighting and the part of the terminal that the airlines will use, Burke said.
"On the 19th American Airlines will resume operations in the west portion of the terminal," Burke said. "Structural engineers have checked out the terminal to make sure it's safe and it is safe to operate out of, and they're ready to go."
Air traffic control responsibilities, which were assumed by the U.S. military following the quake, are slowly being turned over to Haitian controllers. They are currently directing flights from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. and will expand those hours from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on February 19, Burke said.
Haiti's feeble economy was brought to a standstill by the quake, which left 1 million people homeless and living in the streets.
"This is a chance for them to generate revenue. This is how airports make money," Burke said.
At the peak of the disaster the airport had a capacity of 120 landings of military and relief aircraft daily. Those flights have dwindled to an average of about 70 daily in recent days, Burke said.
The airfield is being run out of a portable control tower brought to Haiti by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
FANMI LAVALAS: Sortir l'Etat sous les décombres
mardi 16 février 2010
Pour le pays, pour les ancêtres vivons unis
Pour le pays et pour nous-mêmes soyons unis.
Du sol et du sous sol soyons seuls maitres
Marchons unis, marchons unis
« Nou pap dekouraje, menm kan nou fatige »
Nous venons de compter plusieurs centaines de milliers de cadavres et de blessés. C'est l'évènement le plus tragique, le plus sanglant, le plus meurtrier que nous sommes en train de vivre depuis la guerre de l'Indépendance.
Nous connaissons des jours malheureux depuis l'aube jusqu'au crépuscule du vingtième siècle. Les guerres civiles de 1902, entre les partisans de Nord Alexis et ceux d'Antênor Firmin furent aussi une catastrophe socio politique et ont couté à la nation des pertes énormes. Firmin fut un modèle de nationaliste, un visionnaire moderne, un échantillon d'intellectuel, un élément d'élite qui a connu et reconnu sa vocation. Firmin étant battu par les troupes de Tonton Nord, protégé des puissances internationales de l'époque, devait partir pour l'exil jusqu'à sa mort à l'ile de St Thomas le 19 Septembre 1911.
La guerre des cacos a couté aussi au pays des milliers de morts et d'exilés. Les blancs sont partis en 1934, en octobre 1937 Raphael Leonidas Trujillo a fait massacrer des milliers d'Haïtiens en République Dominicaine.
Cet évènement cynique, cupide et inhumain porte le nom historique de Vêpres Dominicaines. Il faut se rappeler que la majeure partie des victimes de ces vêpres furent les paysans qui fuyaient la répression des marines contre les Cacos.
En 1941 la paysannerie était totalement bouleversée par la campagne répressive anti superstitieuse, dite campagne des rejetés au cours de laquelle on a compté encore des milliers de cadavres. Le peuple était persécuté jusque dans sa foi jusque dans sa conscience. Pendant les trente années du Duvaliérisme, la peur, la répression, la prison, l'exil, l'exécution, sont les mots qui jalonnent la littérature politique du pays. Ce sont des mots qui ont engendré les maux les plus douloureux.
Après 1986 les coups d'Etat en cascade ont multiplié des cadavres dans les annales de la vie nationale. L'instabilité devient une constante, et la mort presqu'une culture dans la politique. Dans moins de vingt ans les troupes américaines et les casques bleues ont foulé le sol national trois fois avec des missions onusiennes comme : La MINUHA, La MANUH et enfin la MINUSTAH. Les catastrophes naturelles ont laissé au pays des souvenirs macabres, ce sont des tragédies qui ont contribué aussi à l'affaiblissement de l'Etat tant au point de vue politique qu'économique. Les cicatrices et les séquelles du colonialisme et de l'esclavage font de la terre d'Haïti et de l'Homme haïtien un territoire et un être en voie de disparition.
Après le meurtrier séisme de 1842 qui avait détruit la ville du Cap haïtien et l'économie nationale, celui de 1904 avait aussi secoué avec violence les régions du nord et de la République Dominicaine. En 1946 à coté des troubles socio politiques qui ont déchiré Haïti, un autre séisme d'une magnitude plus faible que les précédents a tremblé la terre d'Haïti.
Dans tout cet imbroglio politico social et économique l'Etat se meurt. La terre d'Haïti et l'Homme haïtien sont en voie de disparition.
La dégradation de l'environnement est la crise profonde.
Le pays est sous les décombres, les décombres de la dépendance politique et économique.
La souveraineté nationale est hypothéquée au prix le plus bas.
La souveraineté alimentaire est aliénée culturellement. Les familles haïtiennes sont assujetties à des recettes alimentaires ou nutritionnelles qui sont en marge de nos traditions.
Haïti devient un pays de contrastes.
Nous laissons nos terres sans hommes, libres, et des hommes sans terre s'émigrent en République voisine pour vendre leur force de travail à vil prix, nous fermons nos usines sucrières et nous importons du sucre, les valeurs allouées aux élections sont largement supérieures à l'enveloppe budgétaire consacrée à l'agriculture.
Les organismes non gouvernementaux, ONG, sans aucune coordination, s'attèlent à des activités de développement sans aucun contrôle de l'Etat. Haïti est peut être le pays qui a le plus de ONG par tête d'habitants et au kilomètre carré. Ils sont très nombreux. Ils incombent la responsabilité de l'Etat de délabrement seulement aux instances gouvernementales.
Alors ! Le séisme du 12 Janvier 2010 met l'Etat d'Haïti à nu.
Les organismes non gouvernementaux, ONG se substituent à l'Etat.
Cette scandaleuse et catastrophique faillite de l'Etat doit être partagée aussi avec la communauté internationale, présente sur la scène politique nationale en actrice principale.
Il faut créer l'Etat haïtien, un Etat fort et utile.
Si fort qu'on aura tort de l'appeler un Etat démocratique, et si utile qu'on aura aussi tort de l'appeler un Etat dictatorial.
Un Etat fort et utile avec des lois rigides, avec une vision moderne, sous la dictature de la loi.
L'Etat doit être au service de la Nation. Le temps est à l'évaluation.
La communauté internationale, actrice principale, présente dans toutes les affaires nationales doit partager avec l'Etat haïtien les résultats catastrophiques des vingt dernières années.
La gestion de la catastrophe qui est une autre catastrophe prouve que ni les ONG, ni la communauté internationale, ni le gouvernement ne sont pas dans le même sac. Ils s'accusent l'un l'autre et ils contribuent directement au naufrage de l'Etat.
L'Etat est sous les décombres. Les décombres de la maladresse administrative, de l'irresponsabilité, de la dépendance, de la corruption, du pillage et du gaspillage.
L'intrusion des ONG dans les programmes de développement et dans les affaires internes du pays n'est pas moins complice de l'effondrement de l'édifice national.
La nation va de catastrophe en catastrophe.
Durant ces vingt cinq dernières années Haïti a connu dix huit formes de gouvernements, cinq seulement sont issus des élections.
Durant cette même période la pauvre nation est saccagée par six géants cyclones très désastreux et plus d'une dizaine d'inondations sauvages.
Des accidents sanglants et des naufrages meurtriers, des tragédies des Boat people, des massacres politiques; le trafic de l'insécurité font de cette nation un pays de « Deuils et de faux conflit ».
Après chaque changement de gouvernement, c'est une catastrophe sociale, après chaque saison, c'est un désastre économique.
Crise écologique, crise économique, crise sociale, crise politique, toutes se résument en une seule : Une crise de valeurs, une Crise Morale.
L'Etat haïtien est sous les décombres.
Les failles de la mauvaise gouvernance ayant atteint leur phase de rupture, suite à l'accumulation des énergies négatives des coups d'Etat, du pillage et du gaspillage des ressources du pays, de l'anarchie généralisée tant dans nos institutions que dans notre environnement, le séisme a lancé ses secousses. Et L'Etat est sous les décombres.
Violences naturelles, violences sociales, violences politiques!
L'ETENTE NATIONALE EST LE SEUL REMEDE!
Alors que faire ?
Gérer méthodiquement, selon les normes de gestion des risques et de désastres, la catastrophe du 12 janvier
• Il faut libérer les survivants sur les places publiques et leur dire en toute franchise qu'il revient à eux-mêmes de prendre en main le reste de leur vie, la charité internationale ne les affranchira pas de cette geôle en plein air.
• Que les ministères des affaires étrangères et de l'intérieur jouent leur rôle au près de la communauté internationale pour coordonner l'assistance internationale afin qu'elle puisse servir aux vraies victimes. L'aide internationale, sans la coopération effective du pays qui reçoit peut être un instrument de domination.
• L'Etat doit prendre en urgence un plan d'évacuation de la population vivant dans les zones à risques. Les constructions anarchiques rendent la population encore plus vulnérable. Le code d'investissement doit être actualisé et vulgarisé en créant des parcs industriels dans les provinces. La décentralisation de l'investissement.
• L'assistance internationale ne doit pas être éternelle. C'est dans la catastrophe ou le malheur que le peuple doit mesurer son courage. Une partie des masses financières promises par la communauté internationale doit être investie en urgence dans l'agriculture vivrière pour que le pays puisse retrouver sa souveraineté alimentaire.
• Constituer un collège d'architectes et d'ingénieurs haïtiens pour un plan stratégique de reconstruction de logements. Le gouvernement doit prendre un arrêté le plus vite que possible pour surseoir toute opération de vente et d'arpentage de terrain et d'immeubles dans la zone métropolitaine, ceci pour empêcher tout conflit terrien immobilier. La Publication d'un code de construction est d'extrême urgence.
• Réouverture des classes avec assistance technique, financière et pédagogique aux écoles avec un nouveau calendrier scolaire et un nouveau programme. Par exemple il faut ajouter au programme scolaire un cours sur la gestion des catastrophes. L'Etat doit prendre des dispositions sérieuses afin de prévenir des épidémies. En plus un appui psychologique est indispensable à la population en générale et aux élèves en particulier.
Il faut amender la constitution.
Il nous faut une constitution, comme instrument de gouvernance pour une période de quinze ans au minimum.
1. Alléger la machine administrative pour permettre à l'état de mieux s'engager dans les services sociaux et renflouer son budget d'investissement (santé, éducation, gestion des catastrophes, logements sociaux etc.) Pourquoi dans cette conjoncture un exécutif bicéphale ? Pourquoi pas un président avec un nombre significatif de secrétaires d'état. Pourquoi un parlement bicaméral avec un député par commune et un sénat ? Pourquoi pas un conseil législatif de 40 à 50 membres, composé d'hommes et de femmes doués d'une certaine expérience et disposés à servir la nation en péril ?
2. Créer une force armée digne de son nom. Rendre le service militaire obligatoire à tous les jeunes haïtiens âgés de 18 ans accomplis. Il faut mobiliser pour reboiser le pays; il revient à chaque haïtien de planter des arbres comme action civique. Il faut actualiser les lois sur les forets communales. Etablir des pépinières à travers tous les départements. Le territoire doit être aménagé en affinité avec un code de construction. Nous vivons sur un territoire sans plan d'aménagement, sans cadastre effectif. Le bureau de gestion du territoire doit être un service déconcentré de l'armée, comme le bureau de land of management est un service déconcentré de l'armée américaine. Contrairement à quoi bon de parler de démocratie, de développement et de décentralisation. En plus il faut s'attendre à d'autres catastrophes. Le réchauffement climatique est réel. Alors allons-nous attendre les armées françaises et américaines pour retirer nos premiers cadavres sous les décombres ?
3. Décréter l'Etat d'urgence dans certaines villes du pays comme Port au Prince, Cap Haïtien, Gonaïves, Jacmel, Léogane etc. en les dotant d'une législation spéciale
4. La loi doit exiger à tout citoyen haïtien de planter quelques arbres en échange à certains services. Le service de la protection civile doit être renforcé. Il faut insérer dans les programmes scolaires les notions de protection et de prévention contre les catastrophes. L'organisation du Transport est obligatoire. Le transport maritime doit être considéré avec priorité. Déconcentrer les services de distribution des produits pétroliers, l'université d'Etat d'Haïti.
Haïti est aujourd'hui un malade qui peut mourir pour avoir trop de médecins à son chevet. Haïti doit renforcer sa capacité d'absorption, doit pouvoir gérer l'aide internationale. On peut reprendre les mots d'Edmond Muller, représentant du secrétaire général de l'ONU qui a déclaré : « C'est également une opportunité pour les Haïtiens eux-mêmes de mesurer l'étendue de leurs propres responsabilités et de mettre la main à la pâte. Ils sont également une composante du problème. Ce séisme va leur faire réfléchir à leur part de responsabilité et les amener à reconstruire Haïti comme il faut »
Quant au premier ministre haïtien il est plus consistant, malgré les lacunes de son gouvernement, en exclamant que : « Il ne s'agit pas de reconstruire, il s'agit de penser un pays ». La grande inquiétude c'est que les pays donateurs donnent l'impression qu'ils ne s'entendent pas, et chacun d'eux a son petit groupe d'ONG ; et ils concertent pour déclarer le gouvernement actuel impotent, irresponsable et corrompu. Alors Haïti doit sortir sous les décombres pour prendre en main son futur.
Bell Angelot, Professeur
Directeur fondateur du centre
Haïtien de Recherches et d'investigations
En sciences Sociales, CHRISS
"Yon sèl nou fèb, ansanm nou fò, ansanm, ansanm nou se Lavalas".
P.O.BOX 2252 Fort Pierce, Florida 34954
Pour le pays, pour la patrie, luttons unis
Pour le pays, pour les ancêtres vivons unis
Pour le pays et pour nous-mêmes soyons unis.
Du sol et du sous sol soyons seuls maitres
Marchons unis, marchons unis
« Nou pap dekouraje, menm kan nou fatige »
Nous venons de compter plusieurs centaines de milliers de cadavres et de blessés. C'est l'évènement le plus tragique, le plus sanglant, le plus meurtrier que nous sommes en train de vivre depuis la guerre de l'Indépendance.
Nous connaissons des jours malheureux depuis l'aube jusqu'au crépuscule du vingtième siècle. Les guerres civiles de 1902, entre les partisans de Nord Alexis et ceux d'Antênor Firmin furent aussi une catastrophe socio politique et ont couté à la nation des pertes énormes. Firmin fut un modèle de nationaliste, un visionnaire moderne, un échantillon d'intellectuel, un élément d'élite qui a connu et reconnu sa vocation. Firmin étant battu par les troupes de Tonton Nord, protégé des puissances internationales de l'époque, devait partir pour l'exil jusqu'à sa mort à l'ile de St Thomas le 19 Septembre 1911.
La guerre des cacos a couté aussi au pays des milliers de morts et d'exilés. Les blancs sont partis en 1934, en octobre 1937 Raphael Leonidas Trujillo a fait massacrer des milliers d'Haïtiens en République Dominicaine.
Cet évènement cynique, cupide et inhumain porte le nom historique de Vêpres Dominicaines. Il faut se rappeler que la majeure partie des victimes de ces vêpres furent les paysans qui fuyaient la répression des marines contre les Cacos.
En 1941 la paysannerie était totalement bouleversée par la campagne répressive anti superstitieuse, dite campagne des rejetés au cours de laquelle on a compté encore des milliers de cadavres. Le peuple était persécuté jusque dans sa foi jusque dans sa conscience. Pendant les trente années du Duvaliérisme, la peur, la répression, la prison, l'exil, l'exécution, sont les mots qui jalonnent la littérature politique du pays. Ce sont des mots qui ont engendré les maux les plus douloureux.
Après 1986 les coups d'Etat en cascade ont multiplié des cadavres dans les annales de la vie nationale. L'instabilité devient une constante, et la mort presqu'une culture dans la politique. Dans moins de vingt ans les troupes américaines et les casques bleues ont foulé le sol national trois fois avec des missions onusiennes comme : La MINUHA, La MANUH et enfin la MINUSTAH. Les catastrophes naturelles ont laissé au pays des souvenirs macabres, ce sont des tragédies qui ont contribué aussi à l'affaiblissement de l'Etat tant au point de vue politique qu'économique. Les cicatrices et les séquelles du colonialisme et de l'esclavage font de la terre d'Haïti et de l'Homme haïtien un territoire et un être en voie de disparition.
Après le meurtrier séisme de 1842 qui avait détruit la ville du Cap haïtien et l'économie nationale, celui de 1904 avait aussi secoué avec violence les régions du nord et de la République Dominicaine. En 1946 à coté des troubles socio politiques qui ont déchiré Haïti, un autre séisme d'une magnitude plus faible que les précédents a tremblé la terre d'Haïti.
Dans tout cet imbroglio politico social et économique l'Etat se meurt. La terre d'Haïti et l'Homme haïtien sont en voie de disparition.
La dégradation de l'environnement est la crise profonde.
Le pays est sous les décombres, les décombres de la dépendance politique et économique.
La souveraineté nationale est hypothéquée au prix le plus bas.
La souveraineté alimentaire est aliénée culturellement. Les familles haïtiennes sont assujetties à des recettes alimentaires ou nutritionnelles qui sont en marge de nos traditions.
Haïti devient un pays de contrastes.
Nous laissons nos terres sans hommes, libres, et des hommes sans terre s'émigrent en République voisine pour vendre leur force de travail à vil prix, nous fermons nos usines sucrières et nous importons du sucre, les valeurs allouées aux élections sont largement supérieures à l'enveloppe budgétaire consacrée à l'agriculture.
Les organismes non gouvernementaux, ONG, sans aucune coordination, s'attèlent à des activités de développement sans aucun contrôle de l'Etat. Haïti est peut être le pays qui a le plus de ONG par tête d'habitants et au kilomètre carré. Ils sont très nombreux. Ils incombent la responsabilité de l'Etat de délabrement seulement aux instances gouvernementales.
Alors ! Le séisme du 12 Janvier 2010 met l'Etat d'Haïti à nu.
Les organismes non gouvernementaux, ONG se substituent à l'Etat.
Cette scandaleuse et catastrophique faillite de l'Etat doit être partagée aussi avec la communauté internationale, présente sur la scène politique nationale en actrice principale.
Il faut créer l'Etat haïtien, un Etat fort et utile.
Si fort qu'on aura tort de l'appeler un Etat démocratique, et si utile qu'on aura aussi tort de l'appeler un Etat dictatorial.
Un Etat fort et utile avec des lois rigides, avec une vision moderne, sous la dictature de la loi.
L'Etat doit être au service de la Nation. Le temps est à l'évaluation.
La communauté internationale, actrice principale, présente dans toutes les affaires nationales doit partager avec l'Etat haïtien les résultats catastrophiques des vingt dernières années.
La gestion de la catastrophe qui est une autre catastrophe prouve que ni les ONG, ni la communauté internationale, ni le gouvernement ne sont pas dans le même sac. Ils s'accusent l'un l'autre et ils contribuent directement au naufrage de l'Etat.
L'Etat est sous les décombres. Les décombres de la maladresse administrative, de l'irresponsabilité, de la dépendance, de la corruption, du pillage et du gaspillage.
L'intrusion des ONG dans les programmes de développement et dans les affaires internes du pays n'est pas moins complice de l'effondrement de l'édifice national.
La nation va de catastrophe en catastrophe.
Durant ces vingt cinq dernières années Haïti a connu dix huit formes de gouvernements, cinq seulement sont issus des élections.
Durant cette même période la pauvre nation est saccagée par six géants cyclones très désastreux et plus d'une dizaine d'inondations sauvages.
Des accidents sanglants et des naufrages meurtriers, des tragédies des Boat people, des massacres politiques; le trafic de l'insécurité font de cette nation un pays de « Deuils et de faux conflit ».
Après chaque changement de gouvernement, c'est une catastrophe sociale, après chaque saison, c'est un désastre économique.
Crise écologique, crise économique, crise sociale, crise politique, toutes se résument en une seule : Une crise de valeurs, une Crise Morale.
L'Etat haïtien est sous les décombres.
Les failles de la mauvaise gouvernance ayant atteint leur phase de rupture, suite à l'accumulation des énergies négatives des coups d'Etat, du pillage et du gaspillage des ressources du pays, de l'anarchie généralisée tant dans nos institutions que dans notre environnement, le séisme a lancé ses secousses. Et L'Etat est sous les décombres.
Violences naturelles, violences sociales, violences politiques!
L'ETENTE NATIONALE EST LE SEUL REMEDE!
Alors que faire ?
Gérer méthodiquement, selon les normes de gestion des risques et de désastres, la catastrophe du 12 janvier
• Il faut libérer les survivants sur les places publiques et leur dire en toute franchise qu'il revient à eux-mêmes de prendre en main le reste de leur vie, la charité internationale ne les affranchira pas de cette geôle en plein air.
• Que les ministères des affaires étrangères et de l'intérieur jouent leur rôle au près de la communauté internationale pour coordonner l'assistance internationale afin qu'elle puisse servir aux vraies victimes. L'aide internationale, sans la coopération effective du pays qui reçoit peut être un instrument de domination.
• L'Etat doit prendre en urgence un plan d'évacuation de la population vivant dans les zones à risques. Les constructions anarchiques rendent la population encore plus vulnérable. Le code d'investissement doit être actualisé et vulgarisé en créant des parcs industriels dans les provinces. La décentralisation de l'investissement.
• L'assistance internationale ne doit pas être éternelle. C'est dans la catastrophe ou le malheur que le peuple doit mesurer son courage. Une partie des masses financières promises par la communauté internationale doit être investie en urgence dans l'agriculture vivrière pour que le pays puisse retrouver sa souveraineté alimentaire.
• Constituer un collège d'architectes et d'ingénieurs haïtiens pour un plan stratégique de reconstruction de logements. Le gouvernement doit prendre un arrêté le plus vite que possible pour surseoir toute opération de vente et d'arpentage de terrain et d'immeubles dans la zone métropolitaine, ceci pour empêcher tout conflit terrien immobilier. La Publication d'un code de construction est d'extrême urgence.
• Réouverture des classes avec assistance technique, financière et pédagogique aux écoles avec un nouveau calendrier scolaire et un nouveau programme. Par exemple il faut ajouter au programme scolaire un cours sur la gestion des catastrophes. L'Etat doit prendre des dispositions sérieuses afin de prévenir des épidémies. En plus un appui psychologique est indispensable à la population en générale et aux élèves en particulier.
Il faut amender la constitution.
Il nous faut une constitution, comme instrument de gouvernance pour une période de quinze ans au minimum.
1. Alléger la machine administrative pour permettre à l'état de mieux s'engager dans les services sociaux et renflouer son budget d'investissement (santé, éducation, gestion des catastrophes, logements sociaux etc.) Pourquoi dans cette conjoncture un exécutif bicéphale ? Pourquoi pas un président avec un nombre significatif de secrétaires d'état. Pourquoi un parlement bicaméral avec un député par commune et un sénat ? Pourquoi pas un conseil législatif de 40 à 50 membres, composé d'hommes et de femmes doués d'une certaine expérience et disposés à servir la nation en péril ?
2. Créer une force armée digne de son nom. Rendre le service militaire obligatoire à tous les jeunes haïtiens âgés de 18 ans accomplis. Il faut mobiliser pour reboiser le pays; il revient à chaque haïtien de planter des arbres comme action civique. Il faut actualiser les lois sur les forets communales. Etablir des pépinières à travers tous les départements. Le territoire doit être aménagé en affinité avec un code de construction. Nous vivons sur un territoire sans plan d'aménagement, sans cadastre effectif. Le bureau de gestion du territoire doit être un service déconcentré de l'armée, comme le bureau de land of management est un service déconcentré de l'armée américaine. Contrairement à quoi bon de parler de démocratie, de développement et de décentralisation. En plus il faut s'attendre à d'autres catastrophes. Le réchauffement climatique est réel. Alors allons-nous attendre les armées françaises et américaines pour retirer nos premiers cadavres sous les décombres ?
3. Décréter l'Etat d'urgence dans certaines villes du pays comme Port au Prince, Cap Haïtien, Gonaïves, Jacmel, Léogane etc. en les dotant d'une législation spéciale
4. La loi doit exiger à tout citoyen haïtien de planter quelques arbres en échange à certains services. Le service de la protection civile doit être renforcé. Il faut insérer dans les programmes scolaires les notions de protection et de prévention contre les catastrophes. L'organisation du Transport est obligatoire. Le transport maritime doit être considéré avec priorité. Déconcentrer les services de distribution des produits pétroliers, l'université d'Etat d'Haïti.
Haïti est aujourd'hui un malade qui peut mourir pour avoir trop de médecins à son chevet. Haïti doit renforcer sa capacité d'absorption, doit pouvoir gérer l'aide internationale. On peut reprendre les mots d'Edmond Muller, représentant du secrétaire général de l'ONU qui a déclaré : « C'est également une opportunité pour les Haïtiens eux-mêmes de mesurer l'étendue de leurs propres responsabilités et de mettre la main à la pâte. Ils sont également une composante du problème. Ce séisme va leur faire réfléchir à leur part de responsabilité et les amener à reconstruire Haïti comme il faut »
Quant au premier ministre haïtien il est plus consistant, malgré les lacunes de son gouvernement, en exclamant que : « Il ne s'agit pas de reconstruire, il s'agit de penser un pays ». La grande inquiétude c'est que les pays donateurs donnent l'impression qu'ils ne s'entendent pas, et chacun d'eux a son petit groupe d'ONG ; et ils concertent pour déclarer le gouvernement actuel impotent, irresponsable et corrompu. Alors Haïti doit sortir sous les décombres pour prendre en main son futur.
Bell Angelot, Professeur
Directeur fondateur du centre
Haïtien de Recherches et d'investigations
En sciences Sociales, CHRISS
"Yon sèl nou fèb, ansanm nou fò, ansanm, ansanm nou se Lavalas".
P.O.BOX 2252 Fort Pierce, Florida 34954
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